• PHP
  • You need PHP 4.1.0 or newer, with session support
  • You need GD2 support in PHP to display inline thumbnails of JPEGs ("image/jpeg: inline") with their original aspect ratio
  • You need PHP 4.3.0 or newer to use the "text/plain: external" MIME-based transformation
• MySQL 3.23.32 or newer;
• Not really a requirement but a strong suggestion: if you are using the "cookie" authentication method, having the mcrypt PHP extension on your web server accelerates not only the login phase but every other action that you do in phpMyAdmin.
• a web-browser (doh!).

phpMyAdmin can manage a whole MySQL server (needs a super-user) as well as a single database. To accomplish the latter you'll need a properly set up MySQL user who can read/write only the desired database. It's up to you to look up the appropriate part in the MySQL manual.

• browse and drop databases, tables, views, fields and indexes
• create, copy, drop, rename and alter databases, tables, fields and indexes
• maintenance server, databases and tables, with proposals on server configuration
• execute, edit and bookmark any SQL-statement, even batch-queries
• load text files into tables
• create¹ and read dumps of tables
• export¹ data to CSV, XML, PDF, Word, Excel and LaTeX formats
• administer multiple servers
• manage MySQL users and privileges
• check referential integrity in MyISAM tables
• using Query-by-example (QBE), create complex queries automatically connecting required tables
• create PDF graphics of your Database layout
• search globally in a database or a subset of it
• transform stored data into any format using a set of predefined functions, like displaying BLOB-data as image or download-link
• support InnoDB tables and foreign keys
• support mysqli, the improved MySQL extension
• communicate in 50 different languages

¹⁾ phpMyAdmin can compress (Zip, GZip -RFC 1952- or Bzip2 formats) dumps and CSV exports if you use PHP with Zlib support (--with-zlib) and/or Bzip2 support (--with-bz2).