CocoaMySQL is a wonderful tool (at the time of writing I am using 0.7b6) for those of us Mac users who are too lazy to learn the query syntaxes. The only alternative I found was Navicat for Mac. But at whooping $129 price tag I wasn’t convinced I needed Navicat.
The part of requirement of being a web startup member is being able to find a decent software solution for free/cheap. I tend to draw the price threshold at $19.95. Anything more than that, I tend to consider the solution expensive and try to see if I can find an alternative solution or implement one myself. If a piece of software is less than $19.95 and works well, I pay just to get it over with.
Anyway, I settled with CocoaMySQL as the solution of choice for the time being.
The application is surprisingly well built for a freeware. It’s fairly robust and doesn’t seem to crash on my Mac. But I also found some annoyances with the app.
1. When loading a table content, instead of incrementally loading in the data and updating the UI, CocoaMySQL tries to suck in everything and display all once done. As such, when loading in a table with numerous records, the app appears to be hang until the data is done loading. Very annoying if you asked me because while all this is going on, if you let me build a query against the table and narrow the SELECT statement to a few records, I don’t have to wait until the entire table is loaded in.
2. SSH tunnel doesn’t seem to work. This is kinda important though the easy work around is to just create the tunnel yourself like this:
ssh -L <available local port>:<db server ip/dns>:3306 <ssh username>@<db server ip/dns>
Anyway, other than those two issues I find CocoaMySQL to be excellent. If you know of better alternatives including X11 apps that run on OS X, let me know.
