Enter Navicat

Navicat is not only a powerful, sophisticated, and easy-to-use database administration tool with a GUI , but also a very useful aide for developers who work on database-driven applications. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Navicat for MySQL is the first member of the Navicat family with advanced features allowing you to import/export data, back up, or transfer an entire database to another server and design queries in a GUI with point-and-click and drag-and-drop features.

Navicat Premium is the ultimate member of the family, an all-in-one database administration, and migration tool combining all Navicat versions enabling the user to connect to MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, Oracle, and PostgreSQL databases simultaneously within a single application, making database administration of multiple brands of databases substantially easier.

While databases other than MySQL are outside the scope of this book, you may want to check out other titles from Packt, such as those on Oracle database (www.packtpub.com/books/oracle-database) and Microsoft SQL Server (www.packtpub.com/books/microsoft-sql-server).

Navicat is not a free product, but you can easily obtain a 30-day evaluation from the website of PremiumSoft, the company that created the product and brought it to the market.

Throughout the book, the examples will be shown using Navicat Premium version 10.0.9, although you can follow every example and exercise using Navicat for MySQL 10.0.9. Even if you have a version of Navicat as old as v.8.0, you should be able to keep up with the book for most of the examples.

To download Navicat, you can go to www.navicat.com/download/download.html and get either Navicat for MySQL or Navicat Premium. The most up-to-date version was 10.0.9 at the time of this writing.