PHPMyAdmin is a really handy web based tool that helps database and web administrators to keep a track of their application databases in a really simple way from anywhere around the world.

So, recently I was working on a really big database as a part of some client work. The database was quite huge and had some 650+ tables. Now the moment I opened PhpMyAdmin on the portal, it started to take some time  in order to load the tables in the table list. It was okay initially but got annoying after some time.

I saw that the number of tables it was showing in the left column was 250 which was causing the delay in loading the list. So if you too are facing the same problem or to the opposite of this, want to remove the pagination then you should do this.

PHPMyAdmin's default configuration has the following directive:

$cfg['MaxTableList'] = 250;

In order to override this setting all you need to do is add the following entry to your config.inc.php file in the PHPMyAdmin root folder:

$cfg['MaxTableList'] = 50;

This did the trick for me and the table list loaded much faster. However, the number of pages that would show me the tables increased, that is due to the above setting of showing 50 tables at once, PhpMyAdmin applied pagination to all my tables with 6 pages. In order to remove pagination just set the following settings:

$cfg['MaxTableList'] = 680;

However, you should choose the above value according to your convenience. That is the DB I was working with had close to 675 tables to the 680 in the above setting did the trick for me. Generalising that, the value you should enter in that setting should be more than the total number of tables in that Database in order to remove pagination.