mySQL table viewers?

November 1, 2006 11:38 PM

Stupid database question: what are some quick "viewer" applications my customers can use to work with data I'm providing locally in a mySQL database?

We can assume hypothetically that the data is daily stock prices for 1000 stocks over a 10 year timeframe. All the tables are on an external NTFS Firewire drive in mySQL MyISAM tables, and will typically be used with Windows sytems. Users will NOT be writing any new data to the database or doing any entry.

I was thinking of (1) providing instructions on how to work with command-line mysql, and (2) piecing together a rudimentary front-end in Delphi to view and interact with these tables. But I wonder if I'm totally overlooking a database application that works well for this, is very simple with basic graphing/printing/etc, is easy to set up, and has cheap license fees (I'm a tiny, tiny business scraping by).

The only app I can think of is phpmyadmin, but I'm not sure if it's appropriate for this job, and it's not really suited to being put on a Windows system by my end users (who really can't be expected to know how to install and configure PHP).

The whole DB thing is really new to me and it's only in the past month that I've gotten up to speed with mySQL commands and working with tables, so feel free to suggest anything. Thanks.

posted by hodyoaten to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I use DBTools at work for database management. I won't say it's the best, but it mostly works.
posted by krisjohn at 11:58 PM on November 1, 2006

There's dbvisualizer. It works, sort of. I don't think you can do graphs with it, but for just looking at select results, it should be fine.
posted by juv3nal at 12:08 AM on November 2, 2006

MySQL-Front

This isn't a viewer app per say, but it is my favorite admin tool for mySQL. No graphing, but you can easily export to excel to do that.

It's been discontinued but it still works great.
posted by mphuie at 12:24 AM on November 2, 2006

I use MySQL Administrator for tricks my domain host doesn't allow me to do with phpMyAdmin.

It's a free Windows program.
posted by ijsbrand at 12:48 AM on November 2, 2006

Django gives you a great, free administrative interface to your database. It could take you as little as ten minutes to be up and running with it.
posted by evariste at 12:50 AM on November 2, 2006

Give OpenOffice.org a whirl. It's free, you can connect just about any kind of database to any kind of document, and its Calc component looks and feels a lot like Excel and can do charts.
posted by flabdablet at 2:46 AM on November 2, 2006

MS Access. It can link to the MySQL tables with the MyODBC driver, and it makes a great front-end.
posted by Leon at 3:08 AM on November 2, 2006

I use Navicat. All kinds of features. 30 day free demo.
posted by jivadravya at 7:55 AM on November 2, 2006

Toad. Not just for Oracle anymore.
posted by Monkey0nCrack at 11:29 AM on November 2, 2006 [1 favorite]