What is MySQL on AIR?
It is an Adobe AIR client for MySQL databases. About 3 months ago I moved to Ubuntu as my primary OS and the only thing I was missing was nice MySQL tool. I found few different projects, most obvious ones are MySQL Query Browser and phpMyAdmin, but there are always these small issues… MySQL Query Browser doesn’t allow resizing query area (really annoying when writing large queries) and phpMyAdmin, well… it is phpMyAdmin and it is to big for what I needed.
Remembering that someone created MySQL driver in ActionScript (asSQL) I decided to write an application that will be cross platform and is going to offer as much as any other desktop application would.
Now please remember, this is still work in progress, the code is not well structured and it is changing very often but some major functionality is already there.
Following features are currently available:
- query window with results data grid
- new table window
- edit table window
- SQL editor with code coloring (please check notes on performance below), line numbering and selected query part execution (feature known from MSSQL Management Studio)
- multiple windows
- connections management, data stored in XML file, passwords in encrypted storage
- number of context navigation options (for details please visit following URL http://wiki.github.com/radekg/mysqlonair/todo)
Here is a raw list of options I plan to implement in near feature:
- query window progress bar and cancelling running query
- wire all context navigation options
- create and restore CSV, XML, SQL and YAML backups
- handling binary files
- query result data grid improvements, cell alignment and sort support depending on column data type
- query editor improvement – code hints (similar to what can be found in MSSQL Management Studio 2008)
- diagrams and foreign keys support
Notes on performance
While developing the application I discovered following performance issues. Code coloring works perfectly on Windows, there is no speed problems even for queries 500 lines long (I didn’t tested larger ones yet). Unfortunately on Linux with Flash Player 10 I could not get good TextRange performance (more information and sample code soon in separate post) so code coloring is by default disabled on Linux (you can enable it if you want). I had no chance to test it on OSX. Second performance issue is results data grid. I tried running large queries and it appears that asSQL driver handles them very well but ArrayCollection does not. I would not try running queries that return large result sets. Other than that everything seems to be working fine. I’m aware of some small driver issues that I’m going to track down and report to asSQL project owner.
License
MySQL on AIR project is available under MIT license, it is free software, you can download, use and modify it free of charge. But please bear in mind that there is no warranty at all and at this stage it is not ready for production environments.
Where is it
If you want give it a try you can check it out from github: git://github.com/radekg/mysqlonair.git. You will then need Flex SDK or Flex Builder to build it.