Ok, someone's been holding out on me. I've been slogging through with MyPHPAdmin and TOAD for MySQL thinking this was the best there was.

Now I find:

MySQL Query Browser http://www.mysql.com/products/query-browser/

and

MySQL Administrator http://www.mysql.com/products/administrator/

and I'm totally blown away. These tools are awesome, and I'm embarrassed that I've wasted time by not using them.

Highly recommended.

You are easily won over by pretty pictures?

At first I thought: Whoa great tools!

Until I got all kinds of segfaults for easy things. The query tool is a bit horrible with the tiny area where you can type in your query, but then again, it works in a lot of cases (and much better than the swiss cheese MyPhpAdmin...

I'm a sucker for a pretty face!

So far so good with these tools. The query tool bombed once on a full text query, otherwise things are good. The query type-space is small, but it does a cleaner job of keeping history of previous queries than TOAD, and the online help for MySQL is terrific, so I forgive it.

TOAD dies on me constantly, and has these weird quirks about selecting the SQL statement before execution. It's been a non-starter from the beginning. MyPHPAdmin is impressive, but it's support for full-text indexes is strangely limited.

These prettier tools seem to have been out a year, and I hope (but never count on) the open source community will slowly fix the issues. Could be a great thing, but right now it's a step up.

We can't all be of Microsoft's quality (he says reservedly, crossing his fingers in hopes the browser doesn't crash as he posts this...)

I now use freetoad, but it's cumbersome to use... but oh well, it executes the queries