MySQL Database tools - Navicat, Toad and CFMyAdmin

We generally use 2 databases MSSQL and MySQL for our applications. Our personal preference is MySQL but sometimes due to customer requirements we have to use MSSQL.

For ages we were looking for a MySQL manager program like MSSQL Enterprise and in the earlier days used to use MySQLFront, a great little app which is no longer being actively developed. In fact our ColdFusion based MySQL admin tool, CFMyAdmin was modelled on this great little app.

As time moved on and we needed more functionality and reliability, we found Navicat. We bought 4 licenses (best value ever - $139 per license for Enterprise Windows Edition) and havent looked back! The latest version 7.2.5 has absolutely everything we require and is FAST.

Yesterday, I found another FREE MySQL database tool that looks interesting called TOAD for MySQL.

Its extremely complex at first and the user interface isnt as polished as Navicat but the SQL tools and syntax colouring looks promising.

The only thing lacking in both TOAD and NaviCat is an intellisense type interface while writing your sql but hopefully this feature will be introduced shortly.

EDITED 26th June 2006 - Thank you Gary for your comment on the Intellisense. My error, it appears TOAD has intellisence built in. i will turn it on, check it and report back!

As I mentioned above, we developed a ColdFusion based MySQL manager called CFMyAdmin a few years ago and unfortunately, the development has stalled. We plan on picking this free community project up again in the near future, start from scratch and developing a more robust and powerful ColdFusion based MySQL manager.

The problem with CFMyAdmin was that it is extremely hard to make a connection to a MySQL database using a connection string. It works perfectly in ColdFusion 5 as CF5 supports dynamic connection strings but MX removed this option so we had to use Macromedias Java Factory classes to make a connection to the database by creating a DSN on the fly. A lot of thought will have to go into how to connect to the DBS before we can start developing.