Not sure I fully understand what phpmyadmin does.

I created a database in phpmyadmin, and would now like to start accessing the data in it from php. However I have no idea where the database is?

Should I export in the phpmyadmin software? I tried that but it came up with a .sql file which can be opened in notepad and contains the SQL statements used to create the datbase and the one table inside. Basically that doesn't look like a database to me.