David H. Bolton's Website "www.David.Bolton.Name"

Databases

The last four years have seen me doing an awful lot of database work. From a little with dbase (believe it or not, I first encountered that in 1983!) through MS Access, MS Sql Server, and more recently MySQL. MySQL is excellent, but you really need a front end to get the best of it. Both MS access and SQL Server (6.5, 7.0 and 2000) all have excellent front ends. In fact the DTS (Data Transformation Services) aspect of SQL Server 7 & 2000 is one of the best bits of software I have ever seen. Easy to use but very very powerful.

I recently bought My SQL Manager from Ems-Hitech (about £60) and I give it 10 out of 10 for user friendliness. If you are used to the Enterprise Manager of SQL Server, well this is the equivalent for MySql. There are various open source front ends (unless you really like masochastic command line interfaces) but this is vastly superior and.it's context sensitive SQL Editor is just superb.