Thank you very much for answer. Well, I am aware that every application can be different and it'll be hard to find the right one. On the other hand, installing and testing "everything on the web" will leave probably some nice amount of leftovers after uninstallations as this is not the perfect functionality of programs in most of cases. I am trying to find the best option by also trying minimize number of applications to test to 2 max.

What I've heard/read about Toad is that it can be slow with bigger databases and I'm going to have such one.

Is someone able to tell me:
- what is the difference between HeidiSQL setup / portable versions? is the only one method of installation (installer exe / unpack zip)? can I still use latest exe build with portable?
- the same question about exe / zip for Workbench? also, as zipped version is not marked as portable: does it do any changes in registry?
- do character encoding problems in HeidiSQL still exist? or were they in some older versions?

Found the answer for my first question here: Very clever, I must say.

Still looking for answers for my two others questions.

This really depends on what you're trying to do.

If you're looking for the tool which has the best "open this table with 1,000,000 records for editing, similar to the behaviour of an Access database" feature, you may be able to post a specific question about that on the MySQL Community forums and get a pretty good answer.

If you're using SQL and set theory to manipulate your data:

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE DATE_CREATED BETWEEN '2012-01-01 00:00:00' AND '2012-01-31 23:59:59' AND IS_ACTIVE = 1 LIMIT 10000

UPDATE MyCustomer SET DISCOUNT_PCT = 10 WHERE EXISTS (SELECT SUM(Subtotal) FROM MyCustomerHistory WHERE MyCustomer.CustID = MyCustomerHistory.CustID HAVING SUM(Subtotal) > 10000)

(My SQL may be crappy but please cut me some slack as I am making it up on the spot)

Then you're letting the database server doing all of the work. A query that returns 1,000 rows will feel exactly the same in Toad, MySQL Workbench, HeidiSQL, etc., whether the query is running against a 10MB database or a 1TB behemoth.

Yes, of course. This article I was reading was mentioning about Toad in relation to backup or moving data to other database. During test, author of text noticed that Toad had some problems with over 40MB file of sql backup. As my current backup of "relatively" small forum has already nearly 30MB it is kind of useful comparison. I'm rather not going to use SQL windows front very often, more like to maintenance data or to test new www queries, but I still would like to have tool with no such troubles (just in case when I'll suddenly need that).