Hacker News Reader

Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

If there is any project I'd be tempted to be snarky about, it's PhpMyAdmin (although last time I used it, it was 2006). From an administration perspective, it was often a hassle, especially in its beginnings. It is a very successful tool and for a while had the same reputation as wordpress: being a pretty remote shell.

But what PhpMyAdmin illustrates very well is how important tools can be to environments/communities. For a while, the presence of PhpMyAdmin was what gave PHP an edge over many other environments: here's a tool that gives you (and tech-savvy people in your company) insight into your database, allows you to do changes and some bit of backup visually instead of fighting with the command line. And, if you develop on PHP, you don't even have to install anything additional on your platform. It made running PHP hosting without shell access feasable.

View on HN

I still use it daily on my PHP projects, out of choice and out of other peoples'/hosting companies' choices.

I dislike what happened to the UX, though; definitely a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fk with it". Still a great tool though. I'm always lost on postgre projects...

I found both phpPgAdmin and PgAdmin III superior to phpMyAdmin in many aspects. And there's always DBeaver to handle any relational database you can probably imagine.

Although I must say I've yet to see an SQL client that comes close to HeidiSQL (Windows only, MySQL+MSSQL only). (Edit: "MySQL only" was wrong.)

On Mac OS X, Sequel Pro is similar to HeidiSQL. I use it everyday and it's pretty incredible.

+1 for Sequel Pro. Quite the respectable client on OSX.

It's still pretty unstable, unfortunately and there are some weird issues: if the connection drops, you won't be able to retrieve your queries before reconnecting because of the reconnect dialog. And that's if you don't press on disconect and lose all the queries, because the tab will be closed. I'm currently trying to switch to MySql Workbench.

Note that HeidiSQL is not MySQL only, it also does MSSQL. I've yet to find a client as nice as HeidiSQL for my main db environment, Oracle. SQL Developer works, and has some great tools, but the UX is counter-intuitive and very slow.

It's easy to dump on PMA, but what it was built for, it did (and mostly, does) excellently.

When I used PMA for the first time I was a very young programmer, and it really amazed me that such a tool could exist. Oddly enough, this was a really inspirational piece of software for me.

What do you use for MySQL development then? I usually find handwriting SQL queries to be obnoxiously verbose and I don't like the security implications of letting mysql listen on non-localhost interfaces (i.e. for an OSX administration tool).

personally ( = db amateur) I like this a lot: https://code.google.com/p/sqlyog/downloads/list

SSH tunneling from your desktop to your MySQL host and connecting you admin client through that should alleviate the concerns around exposing 3306 to the world.

MySQL CLI via SSH or MySQL Workbench.

For simpler tasks, I find adminer works very well: http://www.adminer.org/ Installation is as easy as uploading a single file. One advantage of that is you can mitigate any security risk by simply adding "die;" to the top of the file when you don't need it.

The most secure setup for administrative services is to whitelist their ports by IP address. For example port 22 (SSH) on our servers can only be hit by known-good IP addresses. You can do the same for MySQL's port, or use an SSH tunnel to hit MySQL through localhost.

Restricting SSH to "known-good" IP addresses is less flexible and less secure than public key authentication.

(Restricting mysql access to localhost and using an SSH tunnel is fine practice, AFAIK.)

It is less flexible, but it is more secure than using public key authentication by itself (public key auth can be used in conjunction with an IP whitelist).

I'm not sure an IP whitelist gives you anything -- it provides a handy mechanism for escalating privileges, both for intrusions on a machine at the "known-good" IP and for unintended network access in general.

Um. No. Bouncing traffic through one device out of probably many at your house (when's the last time you updated the firmware on your TV? Your router?) is a lot more feasible than breaking public key encryption.

I don't use MySQL anymore and I use command line clients everywhere. But that wasn't the point.

Also, sequel (rubygem) comes with an awesome console to write SQL queries in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com