The Home Screen

The most prominent new addition in respect to previous Workbench releases is the new Home Screen. It allows you to access the main features of Workbench in a nice and easy way and is divided into 4 parts.

The upper Workbench Central panel features a few Links and Action Buttons to quickly access common resources.

The lower Workspace panel shows the main feature sets, grouped horizontally.

• SQL Development allows editing and execution of SQL queries and scripts, create or alter database objects and edit table data.
• Data Modeling covers the EER Modeling functionality you might already be familiar with from previous MySQL Workbench releases.
• Server Administration offers administrative tasks like starting/stopping the server, edit the database server configuration, create user accounts, do data dumps and much more.

To quickly get started, use the following steps.

Home Screen Tutorial

1. Create a new Connection – Before you can start any other tasks — using the SQL Editor, forward engineering your model, or managing your database server, you need to create a new Database Connection. You can do that by using the New Connection Wizard or – if you are an advanced user – by using the Manage Connections dialog.You will have to enter the usual connection parameters, like IP address and port the server is running on as well as your username and password.
2. Open Editor – After you have created a new connection, it will be displayed in the list of available Database Connections. Simply double-click on the list entry to open a SQL Editor and start querying.
3. Create a new model - If you want to start your work by designing a visual database design first, click the Create new EER Model action item. An empty model will be created for you, only featuring the my_db schema which you can easily rename to the desired name.
4. Create a New Server Profile – In order to administer your database server you have to register it within MySQL Workbench first.  Use the New Server Profile Wizard or – if you are an advanced user – use the Manage Server Profiles dialog.
5. Open Admin – Once the new Server Profile is registered and appears in the list box you can double-click it to open the Admin.

Let’s take a closer look at the SQL Editor.

SQL Editor

The SQL Editor features a straight forward interface that gets you going, immediately.

SQL Editor Tutorial

1. To give you instant access to your database objects we have added the Live Schema Overview panel to the SQL Editor. To start editing the data of an existing table, insert new data rows or manipulate existing data, simply double-click on the table.
2. You can also modify the table structure by right-clicking on the table and select Alter … . This also works for any other database object.
3. Enter your SQL queries and scripts on the SQL Statement panel. You can execute a single or multiple statements at the same time by clicking the Execution Arrow toolbar icon or hitting Ctrl+Return on the keyboard.
4. If you create new objects by using SQL statements make sure to click the Refresh toolbar icon to update the Live Schema Overview panel and the Schema Tree.

We assume you already know how to use the EER Modeling and therefore we proceed with the Admin.

Admin

The Admin also features a very clear design that makes it easy to access the desired features.

Admin Tutorial

1. After opening the Admin you can see the Server Status panel at the top. Use this panel to verify the current server status and to check the current Server Health graphs.
2. Select the corresponding Configuration tab that fits your current task.
3. After selecting the correct Configuration tab perform the necessary actions on the Configuration page.

After studying this tutorial you should have a basic idea how the use MySQL Workbench 5.2 most efficiently. Please write a comment if you have a tip for other users.

We are proud to announce that we have reached the Beta 1 for MySQL Workbench 5.2. Beta 1 is “functionally complete” and shows the new features for the upcoming version of Workbench GUI product.

The team has worked very hard to reach the goal of including all our new features within this first public beta version. We know there is still a lot of fine tuning and stabilization to be done over the coming weeks to get it solid on all platforms, but this release marks an important milestone.  Your beta feedback is key to this.

MySQL Workbench 5.2 Beta 1 provides:

1. Data Modeling
2. Query (upgrade from MySQL Query Browser)
3. Admin (upgrade from 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 Beta Tutorial

http://wb.mysql.com/?p=406

Please be aware that this release is the initial a beta version – so please don’t use it on your production servers! Also note, MySQL Workbench files saved with version 5.2 cannot be opened with previous versions of our program.

The files for several platforms have been pushed to our main server and
should be available on our mirrors.

Blog postings and general information – including build instructions for Linux – can be found on our Workbench Developer Central site.

Workbench Developer Central

http://wb.mysql.com

If you need any additional info or help please get in touch with us.
Post in our forums, leave comments on our blog pages or if you want to talk to us directly you can visit us on our IRC channel #workbench on irc.freenode.net.

Again, thank you for trying out the Workbench beta, we look forward to your feedback and bug reports.

- The MySQL Workbench Team

Head right over to our download pages and grab a copy to check out current functionality hands on. Please keep in mind, that this is still an alpha version – so do not use it on production data/servers! Also please note, MySQL Workbench files saved with version 5.2 cannot be opened with previous versions of our program.

The files for several platforms have been pushed to our main server and should be available on our mirrors.

The plugin aims to ease the managing process of server instances. What we offer with WBA is a simple way to check status, configure and control one server instance. Some parts will resemble discontinued MySQL Administrator.

And here is a short summary of what we will have in WBA:

• Start/Stop server
• Edit server configuration (my.cnf)
• Manage user accounts
• Monitor user connections
• Status/Server variables browsing
• Log browsing
• Dump/Restore

In this alpha we have implemented a subset, which targets local usage only. Remote management and administration is upcoming. The subset includes:

• Add new Server Profiles
• Start/Stop the Server
• Edit Server Configuration (my.cnf)
• Monitor user connections
• Status/Server variables browsing

To launch the plugin you need to run Workbench 5.2.4, register a server instance by double-clicking the Manage Icon. Once the server instance is registered you can double click the icon of the server instance. But for the moment let’s dive into what is important to specify at the server instance creation stage.

Our target is ‘System Profile’ tab of ‘Manage Server Instances’ form. Mostly, the whole process should be simple selecting the right profile. Nevertheless, for now (I hope you still remember it is an alpha release), one of the vitally important things is to check location of ini or cnf file. Also you may check commands used to start, stop and query server status. For example OS X profile has that line to check for status: ps -cxa | grep mysqld.

All the commands specified in these entries are run as a sub-processes and sometimes they may require super-user privileges, for that purpose there is ‘use sudo’ checkbox. Normally, command run has exit code which WBA checks for to determine success of failure of the command.

When adding a new Server Profile you also need to select a Connection to the server (You should create that connection in the Connection Management dialog first). That will allow you to browse the Connections and Server Variables in the WBA. It will also be used to update the Server Status periodically every second and show the current state (that is in next alpha).

The way to change the my.cnf/my.ini config file is pretty straightforward. First, if you want a value to be written to the config file, you have to enable the checkbox left to each option. After all changes have been made, you can either press Apply or Discard button. Apply will display a Dialog which shows several things: what has changed, resulting file, commands which are used to save file. If changes are correct, press Apply on the form. That is it.

Stay tuned for the updates on WBA topic.

• Registration of Server Profiles
• Start/Stop of the MySQL Server
• Configuration File Edition (my.cnf / my.ini)
• Show Connections and Server-variables

Further we have added the long awaited SSH Tunnel features that enables MySQL connections to machines where only SSH access is available.
Select the new Connection Method “Standard TCP/IP over SSH” in the Connection Management dialog and fill out the SSH connection information.

More information about the new features is coming up here on our blog pages.

Please fetch your copy, try the new features and tell us if you like it or what we can improve. But keep in mind, that this is still an alpha version – so do not use it on production data! Also please note, MySQL Workbench files saved with version 5.2 cannot be opened with previous versions of our
program.

The files for several platforms have been pushed to our main server and should be available on our mirrors.

Please download the program, take it for a test-drive and tell us what you think. But keep in mind, that this is still an alpha version – so be advised to not use it for production data! Also please note, MySQL Workbench files saved with version 5.2 cannot be opened with previous versions of our
program.

For Linux we now deliver the same selection of binary packages as for 5.1. The files for different platforms have been pushed to our main server and will be globally available on our mirrors during the next hours.

The new files are available on our download page:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.1.html

If you encounter problems or have any questions, you can always contact us via IRC (Channel #workbench on irc.freenode.net), leave a comment here on the blog or post your questions and ideas to the MySQL Forums.

The Workbench Team

The next releases of both branches — MySQL Workbench 5.1.18 this week and 5.2.3 alpha later on — will have proper support for Mac OS X 10.6

For whoever might be interested, the bug was caused by what seems to be a slight change in how object/NSView copies are handed in Cocoa. NSCollectionView items are populated by copying a “prototype” object. It seems that somehow, duplication of that object included the fields of child objects as well in Leopard, but not in Snow Leopard. The object copies were incomplete and when they were accessed, it ended up attempting to create a C++ string out of nil.

In the meantime several users did tests and reported us a crash on startup of the application, which means you cannot use MySQL Workbench on Snow Leopard for the time being. We are currently preparing build, test and developer machines with it and will hand out a fixed WB release as soon as possible. So, please stay patient. It’s only a matter of days.

NOTE: This is not about your production server OS, only your personal development OS