MySQL Workbench FAQ Listing

This is a collection of the questions that have been asked frequently.

Technical Questions

Q.1: Which platforms does MySQL Workbench support?

MySQL Workbench is available for Windows, Linux and OS X.

Q.2: Is the MySQL Workbench based on the code of DBDesigner4?

No, MySQL Workbench is a complete rewrite in C++ / C# / Objective-C. Not a single line of code is shared between the projects. But Workbench does build on the experience and feedback got from the DBDesigner4 project and should be better than its predecessor in every respect once GA quality is reached.

Q.3: There has been an earlier Technology Preview Release of Workbench, how is this related?

The Technology Preview Release that has also been demoed during the 2006 MySQL Users Conference Keynote does not share any code with the current releases except the GRT Environment – which has also been updated to the next major version number v3. Bugs found in this earlier release should not be present in the new version, all feature requests of the old version have been analyzed and will be incorporated into the new release.

Q.4: I read that Workbench uses OpenGL but my graphic card does not support that. Can I still use the tool?

Yes. If the machine you are running MySQL Workbench on does not support native OpenGL then software rendering is used. Depending on the speed of the machine the UI experience may suffer. If you are working on larger models you should think about switching to a machine with native OpenGL support. Almost every Nvidia or ATI graphic card released in the past 4 years does support OpenGL. If you are using a virtual environment you should prefer Parallels Desktop at this point because of its OpenGL support.

Q.5: Which version of OpenGL is required for native rendering?

OpenGL 1.5 or higher is required to benefit from the hardware acceleration. When you run on Windows you need a graphic card driver from the graphic card manufacturer because Windows only ships with OpenGL 1.1 drivers out of the box.

Q.6: What min version of MySQL DBMS is supported by Workbench operations like forward/reverse engineering?

These operations rely on presence of information_schema (in contrast to those in Workbench v1.x), thus setting min supported DBMS version to 5.1. We advice to use Workbench with the latest releases of 5.0/5.1 brunches.