The offline alternative

A looked around for some alternatives and the first found was the MySQL Query Browser which is part of the MySQL GUI Tools. It is fast (okay, it is a installed application, but still its fast) and very comfortable for editing and creating tables and databases and also okay for just filling / editing some data inside the tables. Also nice is that is free.

MySQL Query Browser - result view

MySQL Query Browser - Table option view

In the MySQL GUI Tools there is also a so called MySQL Administrator which is nice for some statistics, setting up users and creating and restoring backups.

The online alternative

There is only one but a big con with the MySQL Query browser. I can not run it on my server, because therefore I needed to open the MySQL port and that one thing I definitely will not do.

So I searched for a while on the web and the tool which looked best for me was SQL Buddy:

• PHP-based
• makes heavy use of AJAX
• enough options for the most common operations
• size just 1 MB (instead of 11 MB for the full version of PHPMyAdmin)

SQL Buddy - result view

SQL Buddy - Table option view

For the most common tasks SQL Buddy is perfect. It is nearly as fast as installed application and easy to use.

But nobody is perfect, there are few thing I found out, that could not be archived with SQL Buddy. There is no option to create and import xx.sql.bz2 files, and currently no handling of the different storage engines, which means that you could not use foreign keys for example.

Conclusion

For you local computer you are okay with the MySQL GUI Tools and SQL Buddy, on the server I will use SQL Buddy but for the more complex tasks I will stick to PHPMyAdmin.