Tim Flight

Update #2 I’m using Navicat again for several of my MySQL database tasks, and still enjoy the product. They have also changed their upgrade policy so that users are entitled to all minor updates to the same major version. Very cool!

Update: While I still feed Navicat is a great program, their upgrade policy has left me with bad feelings about the product. I should have read their upgrade polity more carefully when I purchased the product. You are only entitled to receive maintenance releases for the first year you own the product! This is a very poor policy. Right now I’m impacted by a bug, which even though I only want to upgrade from 6.0.9 to 6.0.10 I can’t do so since I purchased the product over one year ago. Instead I’m forced to pay full price to get the next maintenance release. Without the bug fix I can no longer use Navicat at all. They really should adopt a more industry standard upgrade policy. I’m sure there are lots more people like me who will abandon the product rather than purchasing the same version twice.

Navicat is an absolutely fantastic MySQL GUI client written by the folks over at PremiumSoft. It is available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh based computers. On May 12th they released Navicat 2005 for Mac.

The greatest new feature is that Navicat for Mac now supports SSH Tunnel! Fantastic! This means that rather than keeping another port open on my server to communicate with MySQL over I can now just establish an SSH Tunnel (read: encrypted and secure) to my Xserve and then perform MySQL functions as if it was on my local computer.

Before Navicat 2005 for Mac I could do all of the same things I can now, however it was through an open port on my server for MySQL to communicate over…. which while there are thousands of hosting companies out there that live with it that way I wanted something more secure. So Now the MySQL port is closed and I perform all of my MySQL tasks remotely via SSH Tunnel. Yea!

Other new features in Navicat 2005 for Mac are data and structure synchronization, SQL console, and support for Views. While Navicat has some interface quirks it is an otherwise fantastic piece of software I use daily.

Tim Flight
MySQL Guru armed with Navicat

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 9:00 am and is filed under Computer Technology, Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.