Posted on Friday, March 09th (6254 days ago)

MySQL started as a curse word in my web education.  Coming from a background of Frontpage, then Notepad, then ASP and Access, my knowledge of MySQL was skewed by Microsoft developers who believed anything you can download for free must be worthless.

Then I encountered working from the command line to interact with the server and assumed the MS guys were right.  What the hell is this crap?  I can’t even scan through the tables!

At the same time I knew I was missing something when I read about great functions like RAND().  Wow, real random record selection… multi-user access without blowing up…  perhaps there was something to this thing after all.

Ruby on Rails started getting a lot of attention, so of course I had to try it out.  It uses MySQL (of course) so I ended up installing it on one of my Windows boxes.  Ruby came and went with real work that had to be done on time (using ASP) so it didn’t last, but one thing that did happen is that I discovered a couple GUI tools for MySQL while fiddling with Ruby.

The first comes from the MySQL developers themselves.  Sadly it leaves much to be desired so I won’t link it or anything.  The second was great but has been discontinued.  Yesterday I found another and downloaded it and used it extensively through the evening. I had written a bad query that wiped out a couple hundred photograph path entries in one of my databases - don’t ask….

The program is called MySQLyog and can be found here: http://www.webyog.com/en/

I downloaded the community addition.  I freezes up a little when posting changes back to the server, but it was a godsend and allowed me to rebuild the records by hand in less than an hour.  PHPMyAdmin would have taken all night.

Yes, I use PHP and MySQL now exclusively, though I maintain and stand by the work I’ve done in ASP Classic.  It’s still a great language and even Access is great for reading data through websites.

The bummer is that all the new cool toys (like WordPress) use PHP, MySQL and UNIX servers. I had no choice but to jump ship.  Then I discovered the Code Igniter framework which is basically Rails for PHP.  Syntax is damn near identical and using Active Record is just so damn good…

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About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.