This post on Download Squad pointed me to trying Oracle SQL Developer to connect to my MySQL database on this website. After unpacking the download, I tried to connect but apparently I needed some extra software to connect to MySQL.
This link on the Oracle site shows the following table. It appears that the needed jar files are not included in the download.
Table 1-6 Non-Oracle (Third-Party) Database Certification for SQL Developer
| Database | Releases | Notes |
| Microsoft Access | Access 97 Access 2000 Access 2003 |
For any Access release: no JDBC driver needed, but you must ensure read access to system tables in the .mdb file. |
| Microsoft SQL Server | SQL Server 7 SQL Server 2000 SQL Server 2005 |
For any Microsoft SQL Server release: JDBC driver jtds-1.2.jar required; included in jtds-1.1-dist.zip available from sourceforge.net. |
| MySQL | MySQL 3.x MySQL 4.x MySQL 5.x |
For any MySQL release: JDBC driver required. For MySQL 5.x: mysql-connector-java-5.0.4-bin.jar, which is included in mysql-connector-java-5.0.4.zip |
The jTDS – SQL Server and Sybase JDBC driver can be found here. The mysql-connector-java can be found here.
I could not find where to put these files, so I used Google again to see if somebody had written something about this. And luckily, Roland Bouman’s blog had a post on this issue. It’s a step-by-step walkthrough of installing the connector for MySQL. My guess is that installing the connector for SQL Server is pretty much the same. I don’t have a SQL Server database at my disposal, so I couldn’t test this, but my guess is that it will work likewise to the MySQL connection.
I don’t know what you can do with MySQL can do, except for being a datastore, but that’s mainly what SQL Developer can do for you. Play with SQL to try out your queries. I guess that’s mainly what I would use it for, so this way I would not need any other tool to play with my MySQL Database.