If you’re serious about being on the web or any database-driven application, you need the proper professional tool. While anyone can go to Home Depot and, theoretically, renovate their house, hiring the big guns with the best tools, despite the cost, often is the better alternative. While I’ll always be an advocate of free and open-source software, PremiumSoft’s $95 Navicat solution is awesome.

And hey, Google, Adobe, and Intel (all who use the tool) can’t be wrong.

While many developers know that the health of your database is the quintessential backbone to EVERYTHING nowadays, being able to view that data, backup that data, and optimize that data is absolute. You may be thinking to yourself, well, I have phpMyAdmin for that. That may be true for perusing data, but setting up indexes and transferring information between two servers is a pain.

This is where Navicat shines.

You can setup up SSH connections between two servers and do a straight transfer between the source and destination, with progress bar, in Navicat. Even before the transfer, options exist to change the database encoding type, setup a proxy, and test the connection.

Additional features that are crucial to more advanced users include creation of stored procedures for improved querying, setting up views for table definitions, and backups that can be saved in many different places.

Check it out!