Dear MySQL Users,

We’re happy to announce the 3rd Release Candidate (RC) of MySQL Workbench.
Version 5.2.24 includes fixes for more than 70 issues.

MySQL Workbench 5.2 RC provides:

• Data Modeling
• Query (replaces the old MySQL Query Browser)
• Administration (replaces the old MySQL Administrator)
if you are a current user of MySQL Query Browser or MySQL Administrator, we look forward to your feedback on all the new capabilities we are delivering in a single unified MySQL Workbench
As always, you will find binaries for the various platforms on our download pages.

Please get your copy from our Download

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/

To get started quickly, please take a look at this short tutorial.

MySQL Workbench 5.2 RC Tutorial

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Users of the latest HeidiSQL build file will find a new option when rightclicking a data grid: "Copy selected rows as LaTeX table". Same applies to the "Export grid data ..." which is capable of storing rows in LaTeX format to a file.

Thanks to brampton for the patch!

Now there are 5 different text formats supported in grid exports: CSV, HTML, XML, SQL and LaTeX. Probably you know some more reasonable file formats to support?

From time to time dialogs need some usability refactoring. So happened with the good old Copy table dialog in HeidiSQL. New features:
- Select specific indexes or foreign keys to be created in the new table
- An editor for a WHERE clause, for cases in which you only need a subset of the original row data in the target table
- A menu for recently used WHERE clauses, so you don't need to keep them all in mind
- Prompts for overwriting if the new table exists



Thanks to Daniel for ideas and feature request number 2,000.

Users of HeidiSQL 3.x may have missed this feature since grid and BLOB editing was rewritten for v4: A preview area for images. Now it's even more powerful than before: it detects and loads various kinds of images (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, PSD, TIF and more). Also, the new preview area does not take valuable space when you're in some grid, as it's placed below the database tree:

After having updated to the latest build via Help > "Check for updates" you will be able to see more than only the result of the last SELECT query in any "Query" tab. By default, HeidiSQL displays up to 10 result sets in subtabs. In case you want more just go to

Tools > Preferences > Data

and increase this value in Maximum number of query results. Different than before, these are the first result sets from your SQL code.



Please note that HeidiSQL still does not separate multiple results from a stored procedure. Will be the next thing to implement soon.

Also a minor new feature is the hint on the lower statusbar when hovering over the MySQL version. You will see various connection, server and client related details here.

In the last few months we’ve got couple of bugs with the PBXT read/write locking code. One of the problems was directly in the lock/grant algorithm. It was strange to find such kind of error after quite long time of various testing and real-life usage. From the point of view of QA it was clear that manual code review was not efficient in this case.

Given all this I decided to try formal verification of the code. The specifics of the PBXT locking code is that it’s relatively small (about 100 LOC) but quite complex. The algorithm itself is not that trivial but the major source of complexity is concurrent execution of its parts. So if I had to manually create a finite state table for it then it would be essentially a cartesian product of states of all concurrent threads. In numbers that is if there is about 20-30 states per thread and there are 3 threads (empirically I estimated that threads beyond 3 don’t add more states) then I would …

Recently I rewrote the whole internal grid editing stuff to have bidirectional record sets. Means, editing grid data is no longer restricted to the Data tab. Any Query tab now allows you to edit your row data - at least if it's a simple query without joins and if it contains sufficient key columns. This was one of the most wanted features by users, described in issue #723.

As a side effect, query results are client-sortable now. When you click a column header, the grid itself is just sorted. This is surely not a replacement for having an ORDER BY clause in your query, but helps a lot to work quicker with simple grid results. Note that the Data tab works different here - the SELECT query is reposted with an adjusted ORDER BY clause. Only for the query tabs this is not possible as the query is totally user edited, no internal …

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I read in his blog Jonathan Schwartz is leaving Sun/Oracle.  Jonathan was the CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Jonathan has been the force at Sun driving open source.  His voice will not be heard at Oracle so I’m wondering if this will make a change in the way projects like MySQL, Open Solaris and Open Office will be managed.

It’s a busy time of year for Pythian. With many of our team tied up on client engagements, away at MySQL conference this week, and Collaborate 2010 next week, I’m pinch hitting as volunteer editor in helping to pull together this week’s edition of Log Buffer. Enjoy!

MySQL Conference 2010

Big news this week from MySQL Conference as Oracle’s Edward Screven elaborates on Oracle’s plans for MySQL in his opening keynote. Pythian’s Paul Vallee was interviewed by Network World’s John Brodkin, before the conference in anticipation of the session.

Ronald Bradford responds, writing about his …

Finally, HeidiSQL has an editor for scheduled events, available since MySQL 5.1 . First ideas were implemented and committed yesterday. Thanks to all user comments and votes on issue #1527. This is a great feature for all users which normally think of creating a cron job to clean up some tables. See it in action by updating to the latest build (see "Help" > "Check for updates"). This is how it looks like: