We are proud to announce the release of the first official Beta of MySQL Workbench 5.1, the next highly anticipated version of our database GUI tool – MySQL Workbench. For the first time we are making an announcement for all our major platforms at the same time: OSX, Linux and Windows.

MySQL Workbench 5.1 has some major improvement over our current 5.0 release, many of them might not be that visible when looking at the UI only. We did a major overhaul under the hood in addition to enhance usability and adding some features. On top of it, we moved some features to 5.1 OSS, that were only available in SE edition for 5.0 (like different notation styles i.e.). The editors have been tuned to startup more quickly, and some of them also got face lifted. All Wizards have been revamped using our new mForms library.

Please keep in mind that this is the first beta release of MySQL Workbench 5.1, and it’s not supposed to be used on production level files! There is still work to do to get it to GA production quality, but we’re working hard on that to deliver the next, improved beta versions in a short release cycle. So please fetch the shiny new files right from our Download Mirrors and give us a heads up on any issues you might find on your platform, what you like, and what can be improved. Have fun!