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The old MySQL Workbench was ‘retired’ in January. The latest was recent released without a lot of fanfare. The new version is not an evolution of the old and, in some ways, is lacking features like relationship maps and reverse engineering capabilities. Now server versions 8.0 and earlier may work, but are not supported.
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| The opening screen of the newest MySQL Workbench |
New Look
The new version is built on the top of MySQL Shell. A lot of the features from that product are still around, but the look and feel will not feel familiar to the fans of the shell.
By The Way: The MySQL Shell for VS Code has also been discontinued.
Installation can be made from any of the usual ways from the usual sources. This is still the high quality package we have come to expect.
SQL Work
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| What you see when you are working with SQL |
Connections are made from the first page by clicking on the plus ‘+’ button and providing the connection details.
From there click on the box with your connection name.
Now you can write queries to your heart’s content. You will have to click on the blue ‘Run’ button to get the query to execute. Or, use the Run menu.
The GUI is minimalist, to put it nicely.
Under the Run menu, you can ‘run’ the query and use Explain, either text or visual. The visual explain was a highlight of the previous version.
The auto-completion is improved, but other products were much better earlier.
I wanted to show examples of the visual explain, but I only received ‘No database selected’ messages. Supposedly it supports the hypergraph optimizer and specialized HeatWave Query plans. But not on a local instance with a query that ran well with the non-visual explain options. Frustrating.
Notebooks
Notebooks bring the ability to use JavaScript, TypeScript, or SQL to execute code blocks. This was popular in the MySQL Shell.
I liked the Python capabilities of the previous edition.
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| Notebooks provide for JavaScript, TypeScript, and SQL scripting |
Having to hit the Run button or use the Run menu to execute queries gets old very quickly.
Again, minimalist, and very thin compared to the older version. In this age of observation of all things being key, this is disappointing.
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| Server Status |
Performance
Well, the older version had a lot of interesting and sometimes quirky information on system performance.
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| Some performance information is available |
Prepared to be nostalgic again as they are missing from this new version. This an no ERM maps remove capabilities where Workbench used to be top notch.
Conclusion
I have to inform you that I am an employee of DBeaver, which is a competing product. Just as skipping is a competitor to a race car at the Indy 500.
This version of MySQL Workbench is too stark and minimalist in design for me. It lacks too many features.
And it is MySQL 8.0 (maybe) or later only.
I do not know if Oracle/MySQL will add features in the future. This new project is open-source, but will it attract developers to help improve it? Go into ‘not holding my breath mode’ for both cases here.
I will check back when there is a new release, but MySQl Workbench 26.7 is not going into my tool box.
Planet for the MySQL Community