MySQL Workbench Mac support has been requested from our community for a very long time. We got several emails and comments on the web and IRC channel that Workbench is the only tool why a lot of people are still running a VMware Fusion or Parallels session with Windows.

Therefore we are very happy about the recent release of WB 5.1 Beta1 which is the first release that is available on our three main platforms, Windows, Mac & Linux.

Those who have been giving MySQL Workbench 5.1 Beta1 on Mac OS X a try may have noticed the huge speed gain, compared to the Windows version, especially when working with bigger models. We even got complaints why we have “slowed down” the Windows version 🙂 but this is simply due to the GUI hardware acceleration support available on the Mac, as well as on Linux systems.

So for the moment (until we finally get to re-enable full OpenGL support) using the Mac version is the new benchmark of model rendering speed for MySQL Workbench projects.

We are working hard to get closer to a WB 5.1 Release Candidate and plan to release the WB 5.1 Beta2 next week. It will include more than 30 bug fixes and improvements for the Mac UI.