I posted this thread on the SQL Server forum. Since I didn't get any answers I thought It might be useful to give it a shot here.

I use MS profiler to run traces to diagnose issues/problems with any MS SQL Server database. Is there an equivalent tool when using MySQL database? What about Enterprise Manger and Query Analyzer? Is it fair to assume that the administrative tools available for MySQL will do the job that MS tools do for MS SQL Server with comparable ease?

Thanks.

Profiler: MySQL has logging features; you can log all SQL or only slow actions. However, this is much more limited than the tracing functionality that MS Profiler provides. MySQL's GUI administration tool provides a huge number of statistics and tuning controls to optimize performance as well.

Administrative tools: Yes, MySQL has two GUI programs: Query Browser which is similar to Query Analyzer and Administrator which is similar to Enterprise Manager. I actually think that the recent versions of these MySQL tools are better than the SQL Server 2000 equivalents; they have a more intuitive interface and some additional features. Obviously, SQL Server 2005 is out now, but I haven't had the opportunity to use that yet.

I've had far more experience with SQL Server 2000, and only recently used MySQL 5.0.xx on a significant project. I'm very impressed with MySQL but currently my biggest dislike is that it seems to require more tuning effort. SQL Server can get good performance with minimal effort spent optimizing indexes and tweaking parameters. So far, I've had MySQL give terrible performance on certain scenarios until I manually tuned and redesigned certain operations.