Wired has a wonderful little section in their magazine titled Most Dangerous Object in the Office, where they goof around with something completely inappropriate. It's in this spirit of recklessness that I share my new favorite WordPress plugin: SQL Executioner.
Last night I found myself in a somewhat typical predicament: I had access to a customer's WordPress install, but what I really needed was low level database access. In the past I had access to phpMyAdmin, but somewhere along the lines, a password got changed and I couldn't get in. Rather than give up and mail the customer, I thought I'd find a work around.
My first thought was to port an ancient PHP script I'd written to setup a super lightweight interactive MySQL query environment. But, before I did, I thought I'd poke around see if anyone had done this already.
Sure enough, Justin Watt had done exactly this (years ago, no less!). Which is what WP SQL Executioner is. Essentially, it's a text box that will blindly execute any SQL you throw at it.
Insanely dangerous? You bet. Useful in a pinch. Definitely.
In my defense, the WordPress install I was working on last night was in a development environment. Additionally, I removed the plugin when I was done with it.
As tools go, it's a sharp one. But who doesn't love sharp tools?
Ben, thanks for the props. Just a heads up, I've put the code for the SQL Executioner up on GitHub, in case you or your readers are interested in contributing. I'll probably also be submitting it to the WordPress plugin repository in the near future.
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