title: Good piece of software for practicing SQL on Windows?
body: <p>I brought 31 queries down to 3 for a certain page in my application by using a single join (provided by Django's ORM). Up until that very moment I thought of SQL optimization as something I didn't need to worry about. I instantly realized that there are probably so many areas that run slow which could use some SQL tomFOOlery (SQL FOO is for professionals).</p>
  
  <p>Now I'm looking for a piece of open source software that will allow me to quickly create databases, and tables with a GUI, so I can quickly add data and experiment with queries. Is Access good for this (aside from not being free or open source)? Or, does Access use it's own SQL syntax?</p>