Chive: Web 2.0 front end for SQL database management

Changing of the Guard

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Thomas Drilling

Generations of web admins have used phpMyAdmin or SQL Buddy to communicate with their databases. Newcomer Chive has the potential to send the legacy tools into early retirement thanks to its state-of-the-art Ajax interface and impressive feature scope.

Even bona fide database administrators, who aren't afraid to dabble in MySQL command mode or formulate SQL statements and queries, are likely to appreciate the state-of-the-art Web 2.0 environment for developing and managing SQL statements and databases. A more grateful audience, however, are administrators of CMS, CRM, and groupware systems whose SQL skills are minimal.

Most web applications take care of setting up the required database tables themselves when it comes to their MySQL underpinnings, but creating the initial database and setting up users frequently is a task assigned to the web administrator, and if you have ever backed up or migrated a complete web application from an SQL dump, you will definitely appreciate a tool like Chive in your daily work.

Features

Although phpMyAdmin has proved its value over the years and SQL Buddy has many fans, the more modern Chive [1], with its contemporary Ajax interface, offers a number of additional features, such as an SQL editor with syntax highlighting. Additionally, Chive can create code for reuse as bookmarks as well as triggers, statements and views.

Chive also is more secure than phpMyAdmin, with is continual vulnerabilities [2]. For example, Chive supports direct authentication against the database. This makes it obligatory to secure access to Chive on the web server with SSL/HTTPS.

Not all features existed at the outset, but since the introduction of version 1.0 in December 2011, Chive has nothing to be ashamed of when compared with its competitors [3]. Table 1 provides a comparison with phpMyAdmin and SQL Buddy.

Table 1

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