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

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Somebody asked me if there was a cheaper alternative to using the Embarcadero Data Architect (a data modeling tool). I said sure, you can use the MySQL Workbench. My friend laughed and said, it’s to model Oracle databases and they use different data types. I broke the news to him that he can create his own user defined types and use MySQL Workbench to model problems for the Oracle Database 11g.

For example, you can launch the MySQL Workbench, and click on the Model menu option, and in the menu window click on the User Defined Types choice, as shown in the following:

Choosing the User Defined Type option, launches the following form. You can enter customized user defined types in the User Defined Types module:

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One of my students asked how to convert MySQL Workbench’s default Crow’s Foot (IE) diagram to one of the other supported formats – Classic, Connect to Columns, UML, and IDEF1X. Crow’s Foot is also known as the Information Engineering Model method (covered in Chapter 3 of my MySQL Workbench: Data Modeling & Development.

It quite simple, you open the Model Overview window, click on the Model menu choice. In the dialog, click on the Relationship Notation menu option. Click on one of the choices in the nested menu, like Column to Columns.

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The LinkedIn MySQL DB Development group posed a questions on how to handle images. Naturally, the argument always goes: Should images be deployed in the database or the file system? I believe they should be stored in the database because the cost and time associated is too high with regard to managing files, a file naming schema, and backing up the file system discretely from the database.

Since there’s a significant difference between the backup of transactional data and image data, they should be placed in different databases. The imagedb database is where you would place the images and large text descriptions, as shown in the MySQL Workbench ERD:

The imagedb ERD splits the foreign key references back to the system_user table, which contains the individual user credentials. The …

Another obscure issue I ran into not long ago was when using MySQL Workbench, and clicking on a table, it became stuck in fetching mode.

What triggered the issue was a recent MySQL upgrade, but MySQL itself, not Workbench.

After checking the error log, we saw an error like:

Incorrect definition of table mysql.proc: expected column
'comment' at position 15 to have type text, found type char(64)

Instantly, I knew mysql_upgrade needed to be ran in order to fix the “Incorrect definition” issue, and turns out that is the root cause for Workbench getting stuck in the “fetching” mode.

So the solution is to run mysql_upgrade. Should that not fix the table for some reason, then you can also fix it alternatively with:

ALTER TABLE mysql.proc MODIFY `comment` text
CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL;
FLUSH TABLES;

Hope this helps.

Since MySQL Workbench 6.0 isn’t available for Fedora, Version 20, I’m having my students install it on their local Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. You can configure the /etc/sysconfig/iptables file to enable port 3306 after installing MySQL on Fedora.

You can open a port by adding the following line to the /etc/sysconfig/iptables file (Fedora’s instructions on editing iptables). The file won’t exist initially, but you can create it by running the following command as the root superuser or sudoer:

shell> service iptables save

You you can run the following commands as the root superuser, …

GUI monitoring tools for MySQL are not always suitable for all our needs or situations. Most of them are designed to provide historical views into what happens to our database over time rather then real-time insight into current MySQL server status. Excellent free tools for this include Cacti, Zabbix, Ganglia, Nagios, etc. But each of them needs to be properly configured to provide details on what is going on in our MySQL instances. And setting up one of these monitoring solutions is neither quick nor trivial (well, maybe with the exception of Ganglia).

MySQL Workbench provides …

On Thursday, Dr Charles Bell and I will be presenting a webinar on MySQL Utilities; there will be a heavy focus on what you can acheive with them and how you should use them. As well as listening to the presentation, this is a great chance to get your questions answered by the experts (Israel Gomez from the engineering team will also be on-line to help with the questions). As always, the webinar is free but you should register in advance here. If the time isn’t convenient, register anyway and you’ll be sent a link to the replay when it’s available.

Abstract:

MySQL Utilities provide a collection of command-line utilities that are used for maintaining and administering MySQL databases, including:

• Admin …

I registered yesterday for Oracle OpenWorld 2013, and I’ll look forward to seeing friends there. Having worked in the Oracle 12c beta for a year, I’ll be interested in the presentations. Also, hearing more about Java 7 at JavaOne. On the downside, I’m missing MySQL Connect this year.

Cloud computing offers many possibilities, and container and pluggable databases are a great solution. We’ve two new acronyms with the Oracle 12c release. A containerized database is a CDB, and a pluggable database is a PDB. I’m looking forward to seeing more about the provisioning of PDBs during the conference. If you’re new to the changes, check out CDBs and PDBs in Chapter 17 in the …

Did you know that dbForge Studio for MySQL is a great alternative to MySQL Workbench? In case you have used MySQL Workbench in the past, or consider using it now, you might want to take a closer look at dbForge Studio for MySQL, to make sure you pick wisely the tool that will meet your [...]