Look to these excellent tools to improve CLI and web admin, SQL queries, schema migration, and replication and recovery in your MySQL environment
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For database administrators (DBAs), keeping databases running at peak performance can be a little like spinning plates: It takes agility, concentration, quick reactions, a cool head, and an occasional call out from a helpful onlooker. Databases are central to the successful operation of almost every application. As DBAs are responsible for an organization’s data, finding dependable tools that help them to streamline the database management process and ease day-to-day maintenance tasks is essential. DBAs need good tools to keep their systems spinning smoothly.
So what are the tried and trusted tools for MySQL administrators? Here I share my top five open source tools for MySQL administrators and discuss their value in the support of day-to-day MySQL administration tasks. For each of them, I’ve provided a link to the GitHub repository and listed the number of GitHub stars at the time of writing.
Mycli
The Mycli project provides MySQL command line auto-completion and syntax highlighting. It is one of the most popular MySQL tools for administrators.
Security restrictions such as jump hosts and two-factor authentication leave many MySQL DBAs with command-line only access to their systems. In such circumstances, beloved GUI tools such as MySQL Workbench, Monyog, and others are not an option.
At the command line, much of the time is spent in a light-on-black terminal world. So one of the best things about Mycli is the richness of its syntax highlighting. This allows you, for example, to visually separate functions and operators from query strings in WHERE clauses. For a short, single-line query this may not be such a big deal, but it becomes a game changer when you work with queries that perform JOIN operations over more than a couple of tables. Am I doing the JOIN using indexed columns? Am I filtering using leading wildcards in my WHERE clauses? Mycli supports multi-line queries and syntax highlighting, which means you can home in on the sections that matter most when reviewing or optimizing queries. You can choose from a number of syntax highlighting color schemes or create your own.
The other killer feature of Mycli is smart completion. This allows to you pick out table and column names from a context sensitive list by entering just their first few characters. No more abandoning your current input to run SHOW CREATE TABLE because you forgot the name of the column you want in your WHERE clause!