With the first beta of MySQL Workbench 6.0 just released, we’ll go through the list of improvements we’ve made since 5.2.47
New Home Screen
The Home screen went through a renovation and now has a modernized look. As part of the SQL Editor and Administration GUI unification, there’s now a single list for MySQL connections. Recently opened model files and other major features are also accessible from it.
You can organize different connections into “folders” by right clicking on a connection and selecting “Move to Group…” in the context menu.
New server connections can be added by clicking the + button next to the MySQL Connections heading. By clicking the Configure Remote Management… button in the new connection setup dialog, you can add server management capabilities to the connection. As before, SSH access with “sudo” is needed for remote management.
The wrench icon next to the heading brings up the connection editor, which lets you change connection and management parameters from an editor interface. Configuration was simplified compared to 5.2.
SQL Connections
In MySQL Workbench 6.0, the SQL Editor and Administrator interfaces were merged together. You can now access administration functionality, such as restarting the server or listing connections from the same database connection tab. The primary sidebar now has both the familiar Schema tree and the administration items.
If you’d like more space for the Schema tree, you can click the expand button next to the SCHEMAS heading and give it more vertical space.
Schema Inspector
Schema Inspector, allows you to browse general information from schema objects in the server. For tables, there’s also a Table Maintenance panel, from where you can perform maintenance tasks such as ANALYZE, OPTIMIZE, CHECK and CHECKSUM TABLEs. To access, right click a schema and select Schema Inspector.
Table Data Search
You can select schemas and/or tables to perform client-side searches for arbitrary strings and patterns on their contents.
Table Templates
If you find yourself wishing for more control over the default column definition and often create tables having the same common set of columns, you can now create templates for them. The same templates can be used in the SQL Editor and also in the EER Modeling tool.
Improved Server Status
More information about your server in a glance.
Context Sensitive Help
Online, context sensitive help is available in query editors. Place the cursor over a SQL keyword and the help tables in the server will be queried for it. This is equivalent to the HELP keyword from the command line client. To disable help, hide or switch the sidebar pane to a different tab.
Vertical Query Output
A new text mode, vertical query output was introduced. This is equivalent to the \G option from the command line client and outputs the results of a query laid out in Column/Value pairs, one value per row. This improves readability of certain types of resultsets. Ctrl+G/Cmd-G can be used as a shortcut for that command.
Cascaded Delete Statement Generator
You can now generate the list of DELETE statements that would be needed to delete a given row from a table, in case there are other tables with foreign keys that reference them (which would prevent the row to be deleted). Select a table in the Schemas tree and from the context menu, select Copy to Clipboard -> Delete with References. A similar feature for SELECT statements will generate the queries that would list the rows to be deleted from other tables.
Improvements to Log Viewer
The log file viewer was improved for when browsing files that are not readable by the current user.
Modeling
Synchronization
DB modeling got several bug fixes, specially in Synchronization. You can now Synchronize a schema with another having a different name (like sakila in your model vs sakila_test in the server). You can also fix object name mapping issues (when a table or column cannot be automatically recognized as being the same, because of renames) using the new Table and Column Mapping editor.
Syntax Highlighting was also added to the various places where SQL code is visualized.
Table Templates
Quickly add tables using table templates, having any number of columns with the attributes you want.
Improved SQL Editors
A standardized toolbar was added to all SQL code editors, where you can export/import files, reformat the SQL, perform find/replace etc.
Migration Wizard
The migration wizard was extended to support 2 new database sources. You can now also migrate from Sybase SQL Anywhere and SQLite. That makes the total list of supported sources to:
- MS SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008, 2012
- Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise
- PostgreSQL
- Sybase SQL Server
- SQL Anywhere
- SQLite
- and MySQL to MySQL migrations/database copies
