I’ve recently started developing a little database driven application to help organise the music at church, which in turn has meant that I’m doing more interaction with the database on my web server. The “proper” way to do this would probably be to create a web interface but that all needs testing and checking and I would also need to build in a level authentication. To really protect it, I’d also need to get an SSL certificate installed to ensure that transactions couldn’t be intercepted.

So, particularly because I’m still at the development stage where the underlying database could change in all sorts of ways and because I’m the only person who needs to edit things, I’ve decided to just work directly on the database for the time being. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how, until I dug a bit deeper into the documentation with my host (1&1) and discovered that I could use the mysql command line tool via an ssh session by specifying the host as well as the database and username.

That’s probably going to leave most of you utterly confused but being a web and database geek is what I do for a living. Perhaps a simpler way of putting it is that I’ve found a way to work with the database directly and I’m as happy as a pig in muck!