I’ve been ramping up some of my evening coding activities to get my brain thinking about interesting problems. Even at a place as dynamic as ESPN.com, the work can get pretty mundane. A good chunk of what you do is pretty typical day-to-day maintenance, bug fixing, and application development. Sometimes, you have a lot of time to innovate (e.g. RSS, RealTime, etc.) and other times, you’re just working on getting the next sport up with improvements and upgrades (so to speak). Beyond all of that, I made a goal of coding outside of work every day and this fits in well with that.

So, I’ve been playing around with tagging implementation and other interesting tech at home. What I’m finding, though, is that I’ve been spoiled by Eclipse and XCode… I depend a lot more on IDEs to seamlessly switch between languages and databases. At work, I’m in Java mode with a big commercial database while at home I’m working with PHP and MySQL. I used to be happy with just Vi and a shell. Now, I find myself hitting autocomplete shortcuts on all my IDEs. I use Eclipse primarily for Java and Vi for SQL. I’ve been using SubEthaEdit at home for PHP and SQL. SubEtha is pretty good, actually, but I’ve found that I miss the ability to execute SQL directly from my editor (most of the big commercial databases offer that in their included tools now). It’s really not a problem except when I’m trying to tune queries, iteratively tweaking and running until it is as fast as I can get it.

So, I’ve been looking for an IDE. You may have noticed it in the random del.icio.us posts since I’ve been bookmarking the tools. I checked out the following tools:

The criteria I had was pretty simple. I need to be able to edit SQL, run queries from inside the IDE, and it should be low cost/free. I also would prefer that the tool is keyboard friendly, so shortcuts to run/check syntax/etc would be great. For low price, I was hoping to be around $50 or less, considering some of the tools are nearly $100 or more. Finally, being able to connect to MS SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL from the same tool was another big bonus. Oh, and I’m on OS X.

I had trouble getting SQL4x to connect and run on Tiger. I also had trouble with another program not listed above which I left off for other reasons. Of the programs on the list above, I ended up going with, well, none of them. I ended up finding a project called PHPEclipse which looks pretty promising. My buddy Pat suggested I look for an extension to Eclipse, since I already like it and several free or low cost items popped up. This was the one I chose. PHPEclipse has a SQL plugin, Quantum DB, and a PHP editing component. I’m not sure if I’ll end up using the PHP component, but it’s nice that it’s there.

I ended up on this one primarily because of price. It’s free. I also liked that I could get to most any type of DB that had a JDBC driver (which is to say, nearly ALL of them). I can run and view results from inside Eclipse, satisfying that requirement as well.

The runner up was SQLGrinder. It needs a bit of polish, but at ~$50 it’s a decent price for the value. It connects to MS SQL Server, even if you need Active Directory/Windows authentication. Oracle works too. It has some nice features, like Snapshots of query results, and even allows you to see input parameters for stored procedures.

My absolute favorite tool was the NaviCat package, a MySQL only tool that is pretty comprehensive. It’s cross platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It has the most complete development environment, including built in support for adding users, looking at query plans, and internal management for saving query files and results. It also includes other tools for backups of your MySQL databases and includes support, of course, for proprietary MySQL extensions to SQL. I’m actually tempted to spring for it, as the Mac OS X version is $99, but I’ll wait until I can legally write it off as a tax expense (or I win $100 or whatever).

I’ll try and post an update after working with PHPEclipse for a few more days.