[throwawayboise]

I have not seen a GUI tool of this sort that is substantially safer than a command line tool. If you're letting users do things like deleting or altering production data with any kind of ad-hoc tool, you've got a bigger issue than what the specific tool is.

[eternityforest]

Judging by meme threads, and comments on them, it seems like unfortunately nobody got the memo that it's a bad idea.

The usual issues are things like a select without a WHERE, least with a GUI, the tool can ideally do a select before any modifications happen, and say "You're about to affect 39482 rows out of 39482 total".

I suppose you could do things like parsing the SQL, figuring out the intent, and generating the select call, and throwing an error if it can't pre-check things on the CLI, but GUIs also have a speed bump effect that keeps the confident power user types from moving faster than their heads, and different expectations.

People seem to expect command line tools not to have layers and layers of confirmations and hoops to jump through, and the people who want this stuff probably prefer a GUI.