Thanks Mark - looks interesting. I have certainly remained unimpressed by the 'official' MySQL client for Mac - this does look a lot better.

However, for my main area of work with MySQL (creating and administrating websites for clients, very often on shared hosting servers), desktop clients are usually unusable since the web host blocks any external ('remote') access to the database server.

On the other hand, for local development work and / or internal company databases, this does look great! I just want to warn beginners against paying 25 USD for this tool to get access to their site database on a shared host, which then refuses to allow them to connect!

Always check with the site host first if they allow remote access to the database (usually for a specific customer IP address). If they don't, and they don't provide any db administration (which they should!), it's best to install a web based tool on the site's web server, such as phpMyAdmin, as you suggested.
Note that this tool also works only with MySQL v 5.0 or above.

But - thanks again for the tip :-)

Alan

Thanks for filling in for beginners and those who think that this will just work with any host. I also don't recommend connecting to databases across the Internet without any encryption.

Here is a GUI tool to help do what you could do via command line: http://code.google.com/p/cocoa-sshtunnel/

This tool will let you create an SSH tunnel (encrypted traffic) between your workstation and a remote server. This may also be a good way to get around mysql ports that are blocked by hosts. So if you your hosts provides SSH access, you may be able to create a tunnel and then connect from a mysql client through the tunnel to the server.

Also, I agree with your assessment on the official mysql mac clients. I have tried them and have found them buggy in the past. Also, it is weird how they have 2 or 3 different tools that should just be one app.

Thanks!
Shrop

Another great MySQL DB management GUI is Sequel Pro. It's rather young, and also the successor of a previously abandoned project, but it's got potential.

http://www.sequelpro.com

@Ty I like Sequel Pro. It has some nice features too. I used to use CocoaMySQL a lot. I think this project is the continuation of the project that you mentioned.

I am back on navicat guys. I like the Mac UI of Querious and Sequel Pro, but they just don't have the features I need. For example, just the other day, I realized that while upgrading a Drupal 5 site, I accidentally uninstalled the image.module gallery module and lost my gallery taxonomy data. I was able to restore an old database to a local MySQL server and then drag and drop just the tables I needed back into the production MySQL server/db. I don't think you can do this with the others, but a perfect example of what is needed. Also, I just missed Data Transfer too much in navicat. Data Transfer allows you to easily move data and structure between db servers and db's quickly.

Related: Here is an interesting discussion between Querious and Sequel Pro: http://theappleblog.com/2009/02/27/mysql-showdown-...