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:
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.