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Issue: 13.5 (September/October 2015)
Author: Craig Boyd
Author Bio: Craig Boyd is currently a data architect for a growing consumer lending company. But in his 18 years of IT experience, he has been everything from a PC Technician, iSeries System Administrator, iSeries Programmer, Sr. Technical Lead, Data Modeler, and Oracle DBA. He lives in the great state of Texas with his wife and two kids.
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Article Length (in bytes): 9,239
Starting Page Number: 61
Article Number: 13508
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This month we are going to take a look at the database tool Navicat. I was looking forward to giving this a try since it was recommended to me by a couple of different people.
Website: www.navicat.com
Platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux
Pricing: Navicat Premium (Commercial/Non-Commercial) = $799.00/$599.00
The Premium edition is the version I am reviewing. It comes with a database design tool as well as some reporting features. If you think you will only use this tool for a single database platform, then that is definitely the cheaper way to go. If you think you may use it for multiple platforms, then you definitely want to go with the Premium version since they are all bundled together and that will be much less expensive than buying a platform here and there. There are some other editions as well that you may want to take a look at as they may suit your needs better.
The overall user interface (UI) is nice and clean. After you set up a connection you drill down through the typical database hierarchy. There are not a lot of icons which certainly helps to keep things uncluttered. Whatever you think you might be missing, you can typically find by right-clicking or double-clicking. The one thing I don't like about the UI that I find counter-intuitive is that they create sub-menus in the right hand side of the browser. My personal preference is for the menus to either all be located in the main menu bar or through contextual right clicking. Figure 1 shows the three-bar sub-menu that you click on for the contextual functions.
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