FYI, those of you with a Ning social network can look forward to an iPhone-optimized interface after tonight's release. It will be an iPhone web app (not a native app), and while iPhones will automatically be shown the iPhone interface, you can go there manually by browsing to http://yournetwork.ning.com/m. While you can participate in the network, not every feature is available for the iPhone interface.

We're glad to see companies moving forward with developing optimized versions of their sites for the iPhone and other handheld devices -- while "normal" sites are often tolerable on  an iPhone, sometimes it's better to present a faster, more usable interface that focuses on what a mobile user likes to do the most.

Edit: the release has been pushed back to Friday, September 26th. Then again it's been pushed back a few times before, but we shall see.

I stumbled across two lightweight web-based database administration tools: php Mini Admin and QDBA. Both are single PHP files, so you can just upload them to a server, specify your database login information, and be able to browse tables, edit data, and do other administrative tasks without installing the effective-but-heavy phpMyAdmin or allowing direct remote database access to your MySQL server.

Note that you should still take proper security measures when using these web-based tools (SSL, restrict access using ACLs or IP, don't let users log in as root), but overall they're easy & helpful. Of the two, QDBA is more attractive & usable, but is primarily used to view and edit data. phpMiniAdmin is spartan but offers many additional built-in features like import/export, table optimization & repair, and other "DBA" tasks. Both tools offer a SQL query window were you can execute raw SQL commands against the server.

phpMiniAdmin Screenshot:

QDBA Screenshot