I hate using PHPMyAdmin to adminstrate MySQL databases. It looks ugly, it’s unintuitive and simply not user friendly. And still it was still the tool I used to do this very task. I thought there was no good alternative. SQL Buddy seems to offer just that. A nicer way of administrating your MySQL databases.

SQL Buddy is AJAX enabled and refreshes only the portion of the page that needs it. This alone makes for some reduced loading times. However it does play nice with bookmarks and the back button (in the same way that GMail does). When browsing your data you can resize the table columns and sort the data on the fly. One other thing I really like is that it allows you to hardcode your MySQL password in the config file. This shouldn’t be used in a production environment ofcourse, but it’s pretty nice when you’re on your local testing machine. It also doesn’t log out after 15 minutes of inactivity like PHPMyAdmin does.

I’m sure there are some features that PHPMyAdmin has and SQL Buddy doesn’t. But still, it can’t hurt to try it out and you can always run the two side by side ofcourse!