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dbForge is one of the best MySQL db clients for windows, but there is still room for improvements
August 30, 2018

dbForge is one of the best MySQL db clients for windows, but there is still room for improvements

Mortada Abdul Roda | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with dbForge Studio for MySQL

I work at a company (Bumbal.eu) where we provide medium sized and small companies with a cloud based transport management software. With our software they can communicate available time windows to their customers, automatically optimize their planning and communicate current planning to their customers. dbForge is used to design the database for the software and to update all the productions databases with the newest releases. through the sync tooling in dbForge it is very easy to identify differences between database schema's and to produce update sql's to sync the schemas.
  • Connection manager (we use it through ssh tunnels) works effortlessly.
  • Great sync tools for both database schemas and data.
  • Storing code snippets to be used when needed.
  • Nice code suggestions while typing queries.
  • Usually does very well with storing your session and opening all of your sql tabs when opening the apps next time.
  • Does very well when executing large sql files (without opening the files into the application that is).
  • Pretty good debugging help when a problem occurs in executing a query or a files with multiple queries.
  • We have about 10 different server connections open at the same time to manage database on each of those servers. Unfortunately this breaks the very useful typing-suggestions of dbForge, as it no longer seems to understand where to look for the right tables and columns. The query does execute correctly though.
  • I wish there was an easy way to store a standard configuration when doing a backup for databases. There is a couple of tables which we never backup, and every time I have to uncheck those tables manually before doing a backup.
  • The JSON viewer is great, but is also unfortunately lacking in a couple of ways:
  • 1- No folding/unfolding of blocks
  • 2- Depending on the position of the data cell in your screen, the JSON viewer window can be displayed at an uncomfortable position and size, without an option to correct this, making reading the data very hard
  • 3- The search and find function for data in cells is very contra-intuitive: when I open a cell t view it's data, I do not expect the search and find function to hop to other cells. This causes me to loose my current view and having to find and load the cell I was in all over again.
  • This only happens rarely, but when it happens it is very frustrating: the backup or restore function freezes somewhere in the middle of the process without any error or warning message. But as said, this only happens very rarely.
  • I wish I could execute a file on multiple databases at once. At the moment I have to manually select each of the database where I would like to perform an update on before executing the update SQL.
  • Selecting rows of data and copying them into a table (with an equal number of columns and appropriate column definitions) as an update for existing rows sometimes gives unreasonable errors.
  • When editing the structure of a table, it is not possible to copy multiple column definitions to another table, or even just select a couple of columns and dragging them into a different position for the same table.
  • I have seen some very nice database analytics windows in other mysql clients like Querious and even Workbench. I really miss better statistics about running mysql servers + insight into currently running (slow) queries. I know this all available info, so it is unfortunate that I have to write queries and dig into the server myself to find this kind of info.
  • The look and feel really could be improved into a more modern and minimalistic application. Once again, look at Querious for inspiration.
  • We perform better and faster syncing analysis between databases.
  • We update running mysql databases faster and more efficiently.
  • Especially with MySQL Workbench we had immense irritations due to all the crashes during the day. With dbForge Studio we finally had a power tool which is stable and does not crash constantly.
  • Much more stable than MySQL WorkBench
  • Has the power tools a db designer wishes for but lacks in free clients like HeidiSQL
  • Is being improved regularly
  • Is fairly well supported
In my experience dbForge is easily better than most of other db clients on Windows OS. I don't use all of it's functionalities, but the once I need and use are usually pretty stable and straightforward. There is however still a lot to improve in my opinion: the interface could use a more modern look and feel, I really miss the server stats and running queries info, batch executions on multiple databases would be awesome and if the typing predictions would be less buggy for users like us who have multiple server connections running at once, it would make work a little bit easier and faster.