Ritesh Nadhani is like any other college grad—he loves music, watches Star Trek and is a fan of Football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo—except the fact that he doesn’t go to college. This 20-year-old traded his under-grad classes to develop a graphical interface for MySQL database.

Nadhani, son of an IT consultant, says he honed his computer skills when he was in his ninth grade. His father encouraged him to design websites and develop small programs for his clients.

The coding-fever caught on. After school, Nadhani spent many hours, always running into the night, coding whatever came his way. As years rolled on, Nadhani started looking for ideas to develop a software product.

It was just then that a family friend of his, who worked on the Linux platform, told him about the complex tasks involved in maintaining a database and how a graphical tool could ease the process. The then 18-year kid, who had no idea about what open source was all about, grabbed a couple of books and learned to operate on Linux platform, and following that, the nitty-gritty of an open source RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems).

His search on the Internet for various GUI tools that were in the market—MySQL-Front, EMS Hitech, and Navicat—yielded little value. “Most of the tools available in the market were written with a RAD tool called Delphi, which made them slow. I believed that by writing in Win32 API, I could develop a GUI that works faster and efficient and user-friendly than the existing ones. Using C/C++ and Win32 API, I could work at the system level,” says Nadhani who then tested his hands on Win32 programming.

“Win32 API is more robust. By writing the code in C, I could operate on raw sockets, instead of using higher-level socket API. This was the key for the program to work faster than any other GUI tool,” he says.

Most of the graphical tools in the market were typically running to megabytes in size. Nadhani, like any other geek, challenged himself and developed SQLyog, which offered features in less than 600KB! All this under the banner of his own company: Webyog.
“SQLyog was developed keeping in mind the necessities of all who use MySQL as their preferred RDBMS. Whether you enjoy the control of handwritten SQL or prefer to work in a visual environment, SQLyog makes it easy for you get started and provides you with tools to enhance your MySQL experience,” he says.

What’s interesting is that Nadhani developed the code all by himself without inputs from any customer, which obviously he didn’t have access to. Once the beta version was ready, he put up messages on different MySQL user groups that the beta version could be downloaded and tested. To his surprise, he was flooded by mail. People from across the world sent him inputs—and some very heartening congratulatory notes. Some wanted more features to be added and some pointed out the bugs. Nadhani spent the next couple of months fixing all the errors and released the first version sometime in 2002.

A visit to his website would show you reviews and articles written by various tech magazines and websites. For instance CNET says: “the interface is remarkable. SQLyog has a very intuitive interface.”

In July 2003 he started selling his software. Nadhani claims, “Hundreds of users buy SQLyog every month, and there are 500 downloads each day on an average.” Today, the young lad boasts of clientele that number in thousands. Some of his customers include NASA, Bank of America and Adobe. He also partnered with MySQL to gain greater visibility. Earlier this year, he made a maiden trip to the U.S. to attend the MySQL User Conference. Though he couldn’t make a formal presentation, many speakers made reference to his tool—SQLyog. Nadhani was the cynosure of all eyes as he was the youngest person in the entire conference.

In the last twelve months, Nadhani has garnered revenue of $100K—not much, one might say. But it is an impressive figure for a 21 year-old.

These days Nadhani is busy re-writing the SQLyog code-base from scratch to support other open source databases like PostgreSQL. He also plans to make the tool run on multiple operating systems including Windows, and Mac. And this should keep him busy for the next couple of years.