October 5th, 2006 | No Comments
Tools For Administering MySQL
After having happily used phpMyAdmin for a few years, I was recently looking for something a little more robust to manage the MySQL databases on a variety of sites.
phpMyAdmin does have most of the features that I need in order to administer my databases on a day-to-day basis, and of course has the benefit of being web-browser based, but there were times when I felt a little let down with the browsing, export and backup features that it provides.
I’d had a look at desktop MySQL software in the past, such as DB Tools’ DBManager Professional, but never really got into the habit of using it regularly.
Whilst looking around this time though, I realised that MySQL themselves have some software which does exactly what I want, and at the right price: free. (How long has this been around?)
MySQL GUI Tools comes with a few different modules which you can choose from when you install the software. I went for the following 4 - Administrator, Query Browser, System Tray Monitor and a piece of Alpha software called MySQL Workbench. There’s also a Migration Toolkit for transferring data into MySQL from other database software.
In Administrator you can create or edit databases (schema) and tables, monitor the health of your database server (such as connection usage, number of queries and traffic), do backups or restore from a previous backup. If you’re connected to a local server (rather than across the internet from a remore machine, like I tend to do), there are also several other options available to you, such as user management, viewing logs and setting startup variables.
The real fun (we’re talking relatively, of course) comes in Query browser, where you can develop your SQL statements and execute them to get the results from the server. One of the main benefits that MySQL Query Browser has over something like phpMyAdmin is the ease in which you can view all the fields in your tables, as well as all the MySQL functions from within the program itself, without having to refer to an external reference. For each session you use the program a history of your queries is stored, and it’s also easy to save queries and return to them when needed.
The system tray monitor allows you to easily keep an eye on the performance of your server - probably not something that will bother you too much with your average site, but with high traffic sites where the uptime and speed are mission critical then it would probably be invaluable.
Finally the intriguing yet scary looking Workbench looks like it could be a competitor to Access, allowing you to visualize the connections between database tables. As it’s Alpha software, I haven’t yet tried it (I’m not keen on using Alpha software with important data), but if looks are anything to go by, it should be very useful when it is developed further.
The speed of querying the database across the web might make it slow if you are accessing lots of records, but otherwise the performance seems good.
Overall, I’d say that if you have to develop and manage MySQL databases regularly, then MySQL GUI Tools are definitely worth a download.
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