Workbench

First place, by right, belongs to the Workbench tool (developed by Sun Systems/Oracle), which can run on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms. Workbench combines database development and administration and is the successor to DBDesigner4.

MySQL Workbench is distributed under a free license – Community Edition and with an annual paid subscription – Standard Edition. The latter includes additional features that can significantly improve the performance of both developers and database administrators.

What makes the Workbench popular?

• The ability to present the database model graphically, and to edit data in a table;
• a simple and functional mechanism for creating links between table fields, among which many-to-many links are implemented with the possibility of creating a linkage table;
• the Reverse Engineering function allows restoring the structure of tables and links from the one implemented earlier and stored in the database server;
• availability of SQL-queries editor, which gives an opportunity to receive a response in tabular form when sent to the server and other features.