MySQL on the Mac has come a long way in the last few years. MySQL now release binaries for the Mac and those binaries are contained in a nice OS X package and even contain a preferences pane for the System Preferences App to allow you to easily control your MySQL server. I installed the latest version on my machine in work today and it is fair to call the installation process painless. You just click next a few times and enter your password once or twice. Because of this I have no problem saying that the server end of things with MySQL is now sorted on the Mac, but what about client GUIs? In this article I’ll be describing three free MysQL GUIs that I found and tested. All my tests were carried out with the latest stable binary release of the MySQL server for OS X (5.0.21) on a G5 PowerMac.

CocoaMySQL

The first GUI I came across was CocoaMySQL and I have to say I was far from impressed. Although the interface is nice in it’s simplicity the app simply does not play nice with the latest versions of MySQL server and hangs and does funny things so until the app starts to work correctly with modern servers the simplicity of it’s interface is irrelevant. After failing to create a table I un-installed this program.

MySQL Administrator

MySQL Administrator is released by the MySQL people so I considered this app to have great promise. The first thing I noticed is that it gives you an awful lot of
information about your MySQL server and also lets you control the server
and edit it’s config very well. However, when it came to creating tables I
was horribly disappointed.

I tried a simple test to create a table with two columns, an auto
incrementing integer called ‘id’ that is the primary key and then a
column called ‘name’ that is a varchar. The interface let me
prepare it all beautifully but the moment I clicked ‘Apply’ I got an
SQL error. I tried repeatedly but no matter what I did with the GUI I
could not get this simple table created. The GUI shows you the SQL it’s
about to execute and lets you edit it so I did eventually get the table created by manually editing the SQL being sent. I did experiment on a bit
and found that if you don’t use auto increments the interface does work
but since I use them a lot I just got fed up with this application. My
disappointment was magnified even more when I realised that there is no
way to enter data with this app either.

I had very high hopes
that this app would turn out to be my on-stop-shop for everything I
want to do with MySQL but it simply isn’t. The fact that it’s obviously
still buggy as hell and that you can’t use it to insert data means that
I really have no use for this app.

YourSQL

YourSQL is another nice simple front end for MySQL. I tested the latest stable version (1.7.2). This is very much a program for people who are familiar with MySQL and know the various datatypes etc.. This program will only make sense to people who know what they are doing but for those people it will save a lot of time. It uses a Finder style column-based interface for navigating servers, databases and tables which works really well if you have a lot of databases to manage. This is a good app for speeding up simple DBA tasks if you know what you are doing. The app is small and fast and hence I actually really like it.

I spent a few hours using this app today to build a fairly complex database and I have to say I found it a joy to use. It was easy to add a database, to add and edit tables and to view, search and insert data. To me that is what a MySQL GUI should do so this app gets 9 out of 10. Why not 10 out of 10? Well it didn’t do one thing, it didn’t give me an easy way to set up foreign keys. However, the interface makes it very easy to run SQL queries directly so if you want to add a foreign key to a table you can do so yourself quite easily in this way.

Below is a screen shot I took while I was experimenting today.

Conclusions

Although the actual MySQL server is now very easy to set up and control on the Mac there is still a shortage of good GUIs out there. ATM there is only one that I would recomend over the classic phpMyAdmin route and that is YourSQL.