Workbench Beta 6.1.2

MySQL Workbench is the second most popular download of all MySQL products and recently a new Beta version was made available for evaluation. Workbench is a Swiss Army Knife tool with three very sharp blades — query tool, data modeler, and administration. Download here and pick the Development Release. We are looking for feedback on the new version so kick the tires, do a long afternoon test drive, and run it through the paces PLEASE! The changes over the GA release are very impressive and you do really need to try this beta. Packages for all the usual players — Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL/Oracle, OSX and Windows — are available. Windows users get a Zip archive they can unpack where desired and run from there while others get to use their regular rituals for their package manager. The first window you see

Workbench is a multifaceted tool available FREE from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/tools/workbench/

Next to MySQL Connections in the upper left hand corner of the main window is a circled plus sign. Click that to get a dialog box that will set up communications to the MySQL instance of choice. Give your connection a name and then enter your login information such as server, username, port, and password. Click on the button to test your connection to check for fat fingering. Then click on OK and the connection information is saved for later access. Click on your new connection to access the server. In this example I selected the World schema to be used when I connected.

Now you are in the query tool.

Enter a simple query, in the example a select, and then click on the lightening bolt on the left right over the ‘S’ in select. The query will be executed and will produce output.

The data can be exported to a CSV format, filtered, or sorted.

But what about that icon with the lightening bolt with the magnifying glass over it? I have written about VISUAL EXPLAIN before and the Workbench crew have been very busy. Click on the lightening blot with the magnifying glass and you now get three options. The first is the latest VISUAL EXPLAIN

ViSUAL EXPLAIN graphically explaining what the optimizer is doing to the query


The former ASCII style format is now available with 6.1

The traditional ASCII-style format EXPLAIN information is also available under another tab.

But there is a new option to show what the optimizer is doing to optimize the query in detail. This will probably be the place you will spend you time optimizing queries in the future.

I will go over the other two main features of Workbench in a future blog.