MySQL Workbench is a cross-platform, visual database design tool developed by MySQL. It is the highly anticipated successor application of the DBDesigner4 project. MySQL Workbench will be available as a native GUI tool on Window, Linux and OS X.

Some history

MySQL Workbench has been in the making for a while. Building on from DBDesigner 4 I’m sure there’s a community of anxious MySQL developers who can’t wait for a free and quality ERD-modelling (and more) tool for MySQL. The mysql command-line client is brilliant. I love it and will always use it BUT there’s no substitute for managing entity relationships visually.

I’ve been waiting on MySQL Workbench for ages (more specifically a Mac OS X release). On the day the windows version was released I soon installed it in my Windows XP virtual machine. It works really well but realistically its too painful to use via VirtualBox. Could be a breeze with VMWare Fusion. Anyone tried this?

It really is Alpha

MySQL Workbench 5.1.7 is an alpha release for Mac OS X and Linux which prolly explains why the dmg is only 7 megabytes. Features are missing!

And lift-off

Installation was easy. Typical drag-and-drop to Applications folder installation. First launch was all over in about 10 seconds. Workbench crashed when I tried File -> Open Recent menu item. Strange. Evidence follows:

Workbench Crash

And lift-off

On second launch I avoided “Open Recent” menu item. I tried the reverse engineer from .SQL script feature. Workbench smartly recreated a schema from an old project schema.sql I had lying around. I couldn’t edit any of the tables. Workbench complained about a “missing editor”. Maybe it wants to integrate with MySQL Query Browser or something?

Workbench reverse engineer script example

ERD’ing

Getting around an apparently buggy UI I did get to link some tables with many-to-one relationships. The experience was positively engaging. Workbench is already a vast improvement on the kludgy and buggy DBDesigner. Some screenshots to follow:

Workbench many-to-one example

And just to verify that the “Open Recent” crash wasn’t an anomaly I tried it again. Kaboom. A rather strange bug indeed.

Conclusion

If you’re going to use Workbench on real projects I advise practicing the “save every 5 seconds” rule. It is but only an Alpha but a very promising one at that. Regardless. I’m excited. I can’t wait for the first stable release. To the MySQL Workbench (and entire team at Sun MySQL) thanks for great tools and a great database. Love it. Bugs and all.

In case you missed it. A stern warning from Michael Widenius (Founder and original developer of MySQL).

That’s alot of bugs. Its not the volume of bugs thats alarming but the seriousness attached to them. Many are “crashing” bugs! Depending on what you use MySQL for they may or may not matter. Depending on how much data you have that bug list could leave you feeling rather uncomfortable about MySQL 5.1.

Three months has gone by since MySQL 5.1 was announced “Generally Available”. According to mysql performance blog there are some exceptional MySQL users out there. Some on the bleeding edge using the 6.0 releases already.

Is this all a rush to become “Enterprise Ready”? Is it Sun’s fault? Has MySQL lowered its quality standards?

Who knows. I’m keeping my options open (postgres?). Some ex-MySQLers are busy elsewhere. Hrmm. Maybe the relational database is doomed after all.

Previously, the most elegant work around when issuing prepared statements from PHP was to emulate prepared statements client-side using PDO. The other obvious alternative is to not use prepared statements!

If you’re not using prepared statements maybe you should take a look. It’ll save you. Promise. MySQL 5.1 is generally available but I’m not so sure the package maintainers have got a chance to include it into the major distros as yet.

If you’re still on MySQL 5.0 or less… beware! Prepared statements are not stored in the query cache