Navicat, which is a powerful MySQL admin tool, is giving away 3 standard version licenses ($129/each) to WebResourcesDepot readers. You can find the details on how to win the licenses in the post.

Special Discount:

Navicat standard version licenses can be purchased with a %50 discount ($64.50 discounted price) during the giveaway, which will end 1 week later which will end at 08.21.2008 (updated at 08.08.2008) , via this link:

https://secure.shareit.com/shareit/checkout.html?PRODUCT[300175400]=1&COUPON1=promo08

What is Navicat?

Navicat is a feature rich & very easy to use MySQL admin tool with an intuitive interface that runs on Windows, Linux & Mac.

As a developer, I’m an user & fan of Navicat for 2+ years. I have used several web based or Windows-based applications but the easiest, fastest & least (even non) problematic application one for me was Navicat.

My favorite feature is "HTTP tunnel" which enables you to connect MySQL databases when direct connections can not be done (many hosting companies only allow local connections) by simply uploading a special PHP connector file.

Databases can be exported/imported between different formats like SQL, Excel, Text, XML, Access & more.

Another beautiful feature is task scheduling. You can run automated backups, tasks & get notified via e-mail.

Some other powerful features are:

• Manage databases, tables, records, stored procedures, triggers…
• SSH Tunnel for secure connections.
• Backup: backups your databases with few clicks and makes them easily reachable.
• Transfer data between local & remote databases (great when switching from test to production environment or opposite).
• Visual query & view builder.
• Server monitor: monitors process list, variables or status of MySQL servers.
• And many more. See the full features list.

Navicat also has a PostgreSQL version & they will be releasing an Oracle version tomorrow (Friday).

Conclusion:

As an user of Navicat, I strongly suggest any developer to use this great tool to save time & have more functional features.

And, the tool can be tried with a 30 day trial version.

How to win the giveaway licenses?

Just comment to this post with at least "I want the license" text besides any other comment.

Winners will be selected randomly from commenters 1 week later (08.14.2008) with the SQL query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=448 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck to all : ).

P.S. Winners will be able to choose the OS version of the license to fit their needs.

MySQL Workbench is a cross-platform, visual database design tool developed by MySQL. It is the highly anticipated successor application of the DBDesigner4 project.

This tool helps you to see the relations, indexes, tables of your MySQL database as a clear snapshot. With its simple yet effective interface, you can easily get used to MySQL Workbench.

For any developer who uses MySQL, this tool saves so much time for concentrating on other tasks rather than data modeling. You can also print the diagrams and use that sheet for faster coding (that’s what I do).

It is definitely a must use.

It is a time consuming process to create an admin interface with standard functions such as add-edit-delete-update again and again.

ActiveScaffold, a Ruby On Rails plugin handles all the ActiveRecords smartly. It adds add-edit-delete-update functionality with an Ajaxed interface & sorting, searching and pagination support.

ActiveScaffold features:

• AJAXified table interface for creating, updating, and deleting objects
• Automatic handling of ActiveRecord associations
• Sorting, Search and Pagination
• Graceful JavaScript degradation
• RESTful API support (XML/YAML/JSON)
• Sexy CSS styling and theming support
• More extension points than you can shake a stick at
• Guaranteed to work on Firefox 1+, IE 6+ and Safari 2+
• Released under the MIT License, the same one as Rails itself, so you can use it freely in your commercial applications.

htmlSQL is a PHP class for querying HTML using a SQL-like query.

It saves you from writing complex regular expressions to extract values.

htmlSQL example:

This query returns an array with all links that contain the attribute class="list".

Isn’t it great?

How to use?

You simply insert the PHP files from th download package and that’s all.

For JavaScript and AJAX applications, Taffy DB is a beautiful tool.

Taffy DB is an open source JavaScript library that acts as a data layer inside the applications. Just think of it as a SQL database in your web browser.

Let’s say you have a collection of products and you want to find every product that costs less than $10 and is not a book. Simple, just write some JavaScript:
products.find({price:{lessthan:10},
type:{not:"Book"}});

Major features:

• Under 10K!
• Simple, JavaScript Centric Syntax
• Fast
• Easy to include in any web application
• Compatible with major Ajax libraries: YUI, JQuery, Dojo, Prototype, EXT, etc
• CRUD Interface (Create, Read, Update, Delete)
• Sorting
• Looping
• Advanced Queries

Check out the Getting Started Guide for Taffy DB‘s capabilities.

Sample / test data is an effective way to test web projects & applications. Other than meaningless data, real names, addresses, zip codes can make the whole testing stage easier.

WebResourcesDepot have collected some nice free test data generators which you may find useful:

GenerateData

GenerateData is a free, open source script written in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL that lets you quickly generate large volumes of custom data in a variety of formats for use in testing software, populating databases.

Some features:

• (JS-enabled) browser-friendly.
• Many data types available: names, phone numbers, email addresses, cities, states, provinces, counties, dates, street addresses, number ranges, alphanumeric strings, lorem ipsum text and more.
• Option to generate data in XML, Excel, HTML, CSV or SQL.
• Country specific data (state / province / county) for Canada, US, Netherlands and UK.

DBMonster

DBMonster is a tool that generates random test data and inserts it into SQL database.

CSV Data Generator

This is a Ruby based free test data generator.

Datagenerator

Datagenerator is a library and GUI for generating rule based test data for various databases like Mysql, Firebird, Interbase, MSSQL, Oracle, SQLite and PostgreSQL.

dgMaster

Data generator tool which supports many data types (primitive data types,but also names,addresses,post codes,etc.) and generates data in various formats (text,xml,db).It provides a GUI and is extensible by means of plugging-in new data-generator classes.

Spawner Data Generator

Spawner is a generator of sample/test data for databases. It can be configured to output delimited text or SQL insert statements. It can also insert directly into a MySQL 5.x database. Includes many field types, most of which are configurable.

Test Dictionary

A Java interface that quickly returns random proper names, terms and connectors. Useful for populating realistic test data.

Fresh Trash Generator

This is a Java utility package for generate random test data.

MySQL restore is sometimes a bad experience if the database size is bigger than the allowed limit or the execution time of the restore script is not enough. Users generally restore databases with desktop softwares or through the command line in such situations.

MySQLDumper is a backup & restore management script for MySQL Databases, written in PHP and Perl, which fills this gap and offers a complete control over the databases.

MySQLDumper uses a proprietary technique to avoid execution interruption. It only reads and saves a certain amount of commands and then calls itself via JavaScript and memorizes how far in the process it was and resumes its action from its last standby.

MySQLDumper offers to write data directly into a compressed gz-File. The Restore-Script is able to read this file directly without unpacking it. Of course you can use it without compression, however using Gzip saves a sizeable amount of bandwidth.

Users can get e-mail notifications after the automated backup process:

Features

• MySQLDumper can read dumpfiles from other scripts via the integrated parser (for example from phpMyAdmin).
• Security: MySQLDumper can generate a .htaccess-file to protect itself and all of your backup-files.
• MySQLDumper can do multipart-backups. That means: MySQLDumper can automatically split the dumpfile if it gets bigger than your chosen size. When you want to restore a backup and choose the wrong part – it doesn’ matter: MySQLDumper will notice that and will get the correct start file automatically.
• Automatic error module.
• MiniSql: You have access to your MySQL-Tables. You can delete tables, edit or insert data. You can run/ save any SQL-statement.
• Database-overview: look at running processes or even stop them.
• Very good file-overview: backups of the same database are shown as one entry. Click it to see all of the files.
• Automatic file-deletion: set your own rules to delete old backups. Specify the age or the number of files when it will be deleted automatically to save server webspace.
• Perl cron script: all features of the PHP-Script are now integrated in the Perl script that can be started via a cron job.
• Configuration can be set seperatly for each script (PHP and Perl).
• Before you start a backup all your parameters are shown again, so you definitely know what you are doing.
• Send e-mails with or without your dump file attached / you can set the maximum size of the attachement. If it grows bigger it won’t be attached.
• Send dumpfiles via FTP to another server. This is also working using the multipart feature.