Have you looked at PostgreSQL? It's also free (as in beer) and supports stored procedures in a number of languages, including Perl, and apparently works nicely with PHP as well.

There are a number of visual DBA tools available for it (some also free) which make it pretty easy to use.

I've been using the Eclipse IDE lately, and like the Eclipse plugin, Quantum, which extends the basic IDE to allow working with most databases that provide JDBC support.

- mikeB