Recently I found a good plugin to take backup of your wordpress database you can also run queries and can do other database related task within your wordpress admin panel Database backup Plugin for wordpress
You can click on this link for more details and download link Database backup Plugin for wordpress or you can search for wp-dbmanager on google
I'm with you on this one. For whatever reason, i would not trust a plugin for my backup purposes and would much prefer a full database backup. Mine being performed within phpmyadmin. Just my 2 cents though.