I have always had the attitude one should eat their own dog food. (so to speak ;-) Especially when it comes to software. As such, MySQL just released Workbench 6.1 with Visual Explain. I have a production database that holds results from automated performance tests which is updated by an xml parser. Using the Visual Explain I found several queries in the parser causing table scans. Applying the suggest indexes resolved these scans. There a lot of great additions to this latest release and it is free. Worth a look for sure. Whats new in MySQL Workbench 6.1