What is the best web based application to access a database

Question

Sometimes we deploy applications behind customer firewall and we need read only access to their DB for debugging issues as sometimes their IT people are not SQL savvy. We want to bundle our application with some web based application that will expose the database and allow us to fire adhoc SQL queries and show their output in HTML table. We dont want to write home grown code and we can bundle Java/JSP based applications.

Our backend is Oracle so we need a solution that can connect to oracle server and expose it over the web.

Answer 1

If you want the database behind a firewall, and believe me, you do want your database behind a firewall, see if you can have a VPN for going directly into the box. Once you are on the VPN, you can use whichever management tool you currently use for managing the database. So if you use SQL Server, you can connect via the VPN, and use Enterprise Manager to manage the database. Oracle probably has a similar tool, although I'm not that familiar. While having a VPN does incur an extra cost, it will probably make things many times easier.

Answer 2

phpMyAdmin is a good favourite if you're using MySQL. Its always a bit dangerous opening up an application like that if the db is intended to live behind a firewall, but as you say you could set it up ith a read-only account and possibly add extra layers of security on top like simple HTTP Basic auth.

Answer 3

Oracle Tool is a pretty decent oracle web front end. But so is enterprise manager.

Either way, you don't want your database open to the outside world in any way, either via some website or a listener or anything really.

The VPN solution is the way to go, just get VPN and then you can use whatever tools you normally use, if VPN is not an option then a simple firewall rule allowing just your IP's access would be ok, but not quite as nice as VPN.

Answer 4

On my current project, we use SQL Navigator in order to run queries on our Oracle database. I've also heard decent things about TOAD . I would advise against writing a web application just to run ad hoc SQL queries, because it seems to me that plenty of tools can support your debugging needs.