In the 21st century GUI's for any software are the difference between amateur systems run by geeks and professional systems used by business.

Business in this century insists on Graphical User Interfaces for very many reasons and anyone who doesn't understand this is probably not in business.

I agree with Vladislav, HiediSQL is my GUI of choice when working with MariaDB. Love it.

I use it for:-

user and security management, creating and modifying db’s, tables, views, stored procedures, functions, triggers, connect tables, writing and developing queries and for many other purposes.

I do however use a command line interface to do backups, restores and replication management but only because I like to.

And if you're worried about not knowing what the GUI is doing then you probably don't know what it is you want to do.

And yes Zach, I’m also surprised by the number of arguments some people are putting up against using a GUI. This is 2017 not 1977.

It makes the difference between successful marketable business software and geek only software.

P.S. I used a GUI to write this email and it's running on a GUI OS. (not a very good one allbeit; WIN7) Do you know anyone still running DOS or CPM or even linux or unix with no GUI as their OS? Maybe a few geeks.??? But I bet they have a linux based GUI OS on their mobile.

And believe me … I have nothing against geeks, …… I is one.

Bruce Carlson

-----Original Message-----
From: Maria-discuss [mailto:maria-discuss-bounces+bruce.carlson=nepean.com@lists.launchpad.net] On Behalf Of Vladislav Vaintroub
Sent: Thursday, 4 May 2017 4:14 PM
To: Zach Lym; Sales; monty@askmonty.org
Cc: maria-discuss@lists.launchpad.net
Subject: Re: [Maria-discuss] MySQL Workbench Fork?

On 5/4/2017 7:16 AM, Zach Lym wrote:

> database could grow into an awesome onramp for the right way of doing

> things, but MariaDB is letting its only decent UI atrophy.

Why it is the "only decent UI"? I never liked it as UI, personally I found it to huge to be likable.

I like HeidiSQL for UI purposes, and I'm not alone here, a lot of other people like it as well. According to its documentation ,its tested and runs well under wine, so it should run on your Linux and macOS

I looked at other clients, and found Toad, dbForge and Navicat to be decent. Other people praised SQLYog. Some UIs are not free, some UIs might be Windows only, but there is a plenty of UIs, and there are decent UIs among them, and there is wine to run Windows software on your Linux and Mac.

> Thank you,

> -Zach Lym

> On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Sales

> <info@smallbusinessconsultingexperts.com> wrote:

>> On Apr 27, 2017, at 3:05 PM, Federico Razzoli <federico_raz@yahoo.it> wrote:

>> Well, clicking around, selecting things, switching to keyboards, and

>> so on, can hardly be faster than writing an SQL statement - provided

>> that you learn ALTER TABLE syntax.

>> But, apart from that, I think that we mostly agree on everything

>> except one

>> thing: the meaning of enterprise. In an enterprise environment a DBA

>> needs to automate everything and write scripts. Also, as I wrote

>> before and the author of that post also says, GUI's are not reliable,

>> you never know exactly what they do.

>> That said, I suppose that GUIs can be useful for someone, especially

>> for developers and hobbyists.

>> As far as the meaning of enterprise environment, look here:

>> http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/42642/enterprise-environment

>> I see no statement about writing scripts. If a DBA could truly

>> “automate everything” as you state, them, they would be out of a job!

>> :-) A DBA should use whatever tools are necessary and efficient for

>> their job and for problem solving, period. If that’s a monitoring

>> tool, then, use it. If that’s a command script, use it. I can give

>> many examples of things faster in a GUI, but, it’s not necessary

>> here. I was merely agreeing that it would be nice, as the OP posited.

>> And you were disagreeing. I understand you could come up with

>> examples faster in command line or scripts and I would agree with

>> your examples, and I could come up with things faster in the gui. A

>> gui is not just clicking. It can be used in the manner you are

>> disagreeing with (to replace knowledge of alter table at a simplistic

>> level), but it can also be used in many productive ways. They were

>> used even in a fortune 10 company I used to work for. Even Oracle

>> gives you one (not speaking of MySQL). I also count SNMP and other

>> interfaces as GUIs as that is often the end point for their output.

>> Such consoles are certainly guis and are very useful for seeing an enterprise wide view of how things are running. When you have hundreds of sites, kind of nice for a high level view with drill down.

>> I do get what you are saying, however, there are better uses for guis

>> than your examples. And I would certainly never advocate *only* using

>> a gui, of course not. I would only hope for an enhanced (to provided

>> better tools) workbench. And I do agree they are useful for

>> “developers and hobbyists”, to which I would add potentially hundreds

>> of thousands of small business owners, which are wannabe developers

>> and not quite hobbyists as many make a living off of open source

>> software and databases they are using. In that sense, the market for gui users could be much larger than non gui users.

>> Which of course is getting closer to your statement about enterprise.

>> I guess I will agree to disagree as there are so many flaws in what

>> the article stated, each and every statement and conclusion is

>> flawed. It’s not a good example! Maybe we do agree more than I initially thought.