I’ve been using the MySQL Workbench 5.1 beta for the past few days now, and I’m wondering how I designed databases without it.
Okay, so that’s a pretty strong statement, but I’m genuinely happy with it. 5.1 has fixed my main problem with 5.0, in that the EER diagram mode was horribly slow to render, now it’s all nice and smooth. The ability to easily visualise tables and their relationships makes design very simple.
In fact, I really only have one (minor) complaint, the ability to export without foreign keys would be nice. Sometimes you just don’t want to deal with the performance hit.
That’s about it. Go and download the OSS edition for free now, have a play around. Make it your Friday afternoon experiment. I promise you’ll like it.
A video tutorial would be helpful. I am trying to do simple joins but the application puts in duplicate attributes in the referencing entity. It doesn’t refresh the entity when a data type is changed. I didn’t find it easy to use.