PhpMyAdmin is a popular web-based MySQL and MariaDB administration tool. It enables option to print database schema to a html page.

This tutorial will show you how to export data dictionary for an existing MySQL and MariaDB database using phpMyAdmin 4.8.1.

To print data dictionary first select your database, then click the Structure tab and click on the Data dictionary option below the list of tables.

This option generates the documentation in an HTML page. This is how it looks:

Documentation includes:

• list of tables/views and columns
• data types
• default values
• column nullability
• table and column comments
• foreign keys
• indexes and primary keys

Documentation does not include:

• triggers
• stored procedures
• user-defined functions

An alternative: Dataedo

If you want more from the data dictionary export, have a look at Dataedo. Not only it generates much better looking and interactive HTML but also allows you to visualize schema with ER diagrams, split large database into modules, describe each data element and document table relationships. Here is a sample documentation:

See live sample

Try it yourself for free now