First look at Navicat 9 for MySQL, Mac OS X version

Main window with connections on the left, and tables on the right

Query editor

Table records

Auto complete

Navicat for MySql is a tool I use on a daily basis, and is in my opinion the best MySQL gui out there. Before I switched to Mac I used SQLyog (great piece of software as well) which is Windows only, so I had to find something similar for Mac OS X. And there are two things I absolutely need from my MySQL app:

• Database structure synchronisation (between multiple servers)
• Database transfer (copy) from one server to another

And so far the only app I found for Mac OS X that does these two things is Navicat. And it does them really well.

I've been using Navicat since version 7 and this new version 9 I just upgraded to is the first one that looks and feels like modern native Mac OS X app. There are a lot of standard Mac OS X GUI elements all over the place, better icons, some nice usage of core animations.

There are also a couple of other new features (like greatly improved code completion, code folding, SQL beautifier…) but I'm a sucker for nice GUI, so that alone is worth of upgrade for me.

If Navicat Premium wasn't that expensive I would have upgraded to that, it would be nice to have SQLite support in Navicat, but than again I don't really need Oracle and PostgreSQL support.