[Vince]

1. Depends on the query.
2. No, more.
3. No. Most people use phpMyAdmin but there are stand-alone tools like MySQL Workbench.

Yes, PHP can read and parse ini files relatively simple, but if you need to retrieve those files from an external server then it becomes more difficult because you will first need to copy those files to your local server via the FTP functions in PHP. Don't ask me how to do that, I've never tried.

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On another note, I would very much like to see better internal handling of NULL values. If a NULL value appears in a non-string column and you try to retrieve it with the _int or _float functions you will get errors. Maybe add another optional parameter to cache_get_row_int and cache_get_row_float that allows the user to specify a default value should the field be NULL.

I know you can use IFNULL in the query to circumvent the problem, but if you have a lot of fields that can be NULL then it can significantly lengthen the query. Especially if you also want to add an alias for use with the cache_get_field_content functions.