GUI Clients and Application Development

GUI Clients

The simplest way to think about a GUI client is to consider it to be a sophisticated, flashy wrapper around a command line client. Really, it falls into the third category of interaction, application development, but since the only purpose of this application is to interface with the database, we can refer to it separately as a GUI client.

The GUI client gives the user an easy-to-use, point-and-click interface to the internals of the database. The user may browse databases, schemas, tables, keys, sequences, and, essentially, everything else the user could possibly want to know about a database. In most cases, the GUI client also has a direct interface to a simulated command line, so the user can enter raw SQL code, in addition to browsing through the database. Figure 2 shows the object browser in pgAdmin III, a free, cross-platform GUI client for PostgreSQL .

Figure 2. The object browser in pgAdmin III

With an easy tree format to identify every element of the database and access to even more information with a few simple clicks, the GUI client is an excellent choice for database interaction for many users.

Figure 3 shows the Server Information page of MySQL Administrator, the standard GUI tool for MySQL databases.

Figure 3. The MySQL Administrator Server Information page

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