SQL Buddy is a new plugin from Delicious Brains. They make the Better Search and Replace, WP Migrate DB, and Advanced Custom Fields plugins, so I figured they know what they are doing. The plugin is currently on version 1.0 and has about 40 active installs. So, very new.
Walk-Through
I installed it and gave it a quick look. When installed, it adds a menu item under the Tools admin menu and starts out on the Dashboard page showing a list of tables. You can see the table names, how many records each has, and the data usage in megabytes.
When you click on one of the tables in the list then you go to the Tables page where there is a list of tables on the left and the selected table in the middle. With a table selected, you see the columns and rows. If there are a lot of rows then there they are paginated.
Above the rows there are two icons. If you click on the “eye” icon you can hide columns by toggling them off.
If you click on the funnel icon then you can filter the rows. The filter works by first picking a column, then the operator of which there is a large list, and then your search term. It is possible to add more than one search term to the filter.
When you click on a row then the row’s columns show down the right side. You can click into the text boxes and edit the values. There is a “Save,” “Cancel,” and trash icon at the bottom. Clicking on the trash icon deletes the row.
Conclusions
You might occasionally want to view records in the database. Most people would usually turn to a tool like PHPMyAdmin, but SQL Buddy makes it easy to see the tables, select the one you need, and find the rows you need from within the WordPress admin. I can see it working well for something like viewing log records. The ability to remove a row or edit the values in a row could be useful as well. However, the tool is pretty limited. You cannot do a join, so you can’t see the complete information about an item and you can only edit one row at a time. These limitations suggest that the version of SQL Buddy in the WordPress plugin directory is meant as a “lite” version and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a more robust premium version released in the future.
