There hasn’t been a blog post for some time now but that does not mean that the MySQL Workbench Team has been lazy – the contrary.

All I can say at this point is that everybody should check out the upcoming Beta release of MySQL Workbench 5.2 and be prepared for something big.

Hint: Please take a look at the screenshots below. Post your speculations as comments to this blog post.

Screen 1:

Screen 2:

Some people are reporting slowness problems with MySQL Workbench 5.0 and after chatting with a few of these persons, I’ve gotten an idea of the causes.Although the sluggishness has generally been blamed to the graphics rendering, there are a couple other issues that affect performance.  If you follow these steps, you might get a more comfortable working experience:

1. Upgrade to the latest version. Workbench 5.0 is still being continually maintained and some performance related bugs are fixed from time to time. There might be other important bugs that are fixed too, so it’s worth upgrading anyway.
2. Limit the number of steps to save in the Undo History. Depending on the operations performed, having infinite undo history can use a lot of memory after a few hours of work.  In Tools -> Options -> General, enter some number around 10 ~ 20 in the option …

Before I am leaving for my summer vacation I wanted to share the first screen designs for the Mac version of Workbench. Click on the small images below to view the screenshots at full size.

The first shot shows the new Overview Page. It holds the Workbench Central panel (that can be collapsed of course), the Machine-Group panels and a Notes panel. Each machine tab holds a list of Database Connections and MySQL Models that are associated with that particular machine. (The list of Database Instances shown in this screenshot - which will give you access to administrative features - are a WB 6.0 feature coming later next year).

When you double-click a Database Connection you will get to the new SQL Query interface that is show on the next screenshot. When a MySQL Model has been double-clicked the model is opened on a new main-tab …