The MySQL Workbench team just uploaded a new video to the MySQL channel at Youtube. This video is meant for beginners and describes the process of creating and troubleshooting connections in MySQL Workbench.

In teaching, I had a problem because my students have different base operating systems, like Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux, and Mac OS X. I needed a teaching and lecture platform that would let me teach it all (not to mention support their environments). That meant it had to virtualize any of the following with a portable device:

• Windows 7 or 8 hosting natively an Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Windows 7 or 8 hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Mac OS X hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Ubuntu hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or …

If you’re having frequent MySQL Workbench crashes in Mac OS X, check whether you don’t have some Subversion plugin installed, such as SCFinderPlugin or SCToolbarButton. Apparently they are outdated and do not work well in recent versions of OS X, causing certain other innocent applications to crash. Removing these plugins should fix the problem in affected apps, including Workbench.

See Bug #71119 or Bug #68080

To check whether this is your problem, look for a line similar to the following in the Mac OS X crashlogs generated for Workbench:

0xbe29000 -  0xbe2dff7 +org.tigris.scfinderplugin (169) <BBADB6CA-61AE-24D5-4E0A-EBCCAD3F0D92> /Library/Contextual Menu Items/SCFinderPlugin.plugin/Contents/MacOS/SCFinderPlugin

To uninstall that plugin, delete the following …

I have been meaning to write this down for quite some time, but it always eluded me. When you are using Time Machine to back up your Mac, you get the chance of password-protecting your backups.

Whenever the machine is restarted you will have to unlock the disk by entering the password, unless you store the password for the backup disk in your keychain. For paranoia's sake (and to keep the password fresh in my memory, just in case) I do not store the password in the keychain.

Now, what happens quite regularly to me is this: I reboot the machine for some reason or other, and while it is doing that, I leave the room and do something else. Before I know it, maybe an hour has passed before I come back. In the meantime, the external Time Machine drive has gone to sleep, because it was not used for an extended period of time. On the screen, there is the password dialog dutifully waiting for me to unlock the protected volume.

As …

In a recent post we showed you how to migrate a SQL Server database to MySQL. There, we used the oficial Microsoft ODBC driver and that’s OK if you are running MySQL Workbench in Windows. But what if your desktop OS is some Linux variant or Mac OS X?

It turns out that Microsoft has recently released an ODBC driver for Linux. However, you can’t use this driver with MySQL Workbench for Linux. (Actually you can, but you would have to rebuild Workbench). The main reason is that this ODBC driver was linked against unixODBC (an ODBC driver manager), while Workbench uses another ODBC driver manager: iODBC and the two of them can’t coexist in the same system.

So for Linux …

I like using OS X's built-in packages where possible, but unfortunately Apple is way behind with their PHP package, having it locked on 5.3.15. In the past I've seen people use tools like Mamp, or Xampp to provide this for them, but frankly I'm not a big fan of these tools.

Homebrew provides a solution. Homebrew is OS X missing package manager, and it's an absolute great tool to work with. Getting started with it is a bit harder, as there's a few bigger dependencies you need, such as an up-to-date XCode installation. Once you've installed homebrew, it's a matter of running the following commands:

1. brew tap homebrew/dupes
2. brew tap josegonzalez/homebrew-php
3. brew install php54 --with-mysql
…

While I try to contain everything about installing MySQL in a single post that I update from time-to-time, Mac OS X, Mountain Lion (10.8.x), requires some pre-steps. You must install XCode, and the Command Line Tools. This post provides the screen shots and step-by-step instructions.

Before you can do any of these steps, you must connect to the Apple Store and download XCode. Dependent on your internet speed this may take some time. Generally, it’s an hour or less.

1. After installing XCode, click the Rocket Spaceship in the Mac Dock to launch a view of your Applications. Launch XCode by clicking on the hammer overlaying the blue background XCode icon shown below.

1. After launching …

This is about me getting a substantial amount of grey hair over the past couple of days, trying to hunt down a setting that would cause the current version of Xcode 4 to build my iOS projects to an unexpected, but not unfamiliar, taken over from Xcode 3, location, but not presenting any obvious way to revert that.


A little history
In Xcode3 you could use the preferences dialog to configure custom build output folders. This was necessary when you wanted to organize a somewhat more complex software into several cross-referencing Xcode projects and at the same time retain some sanity when linking and packaging it. Clint Harris Tutorial on shared libraries describes it in more detail.

The preferences dialog looked like this (image copied from Clint’s site, because I didn’t have any Xcode3 installation …

MySQL Workbench 5.2.36 has been released. This release is part of an ongoing effort committed to improving the day to day usability of the product based on accumulated experience from tools such as MySQL Query Browser and input from user feedback.

This specific version was focused on improving usability of the Query Editor. Some of the changes introduced are:

• New, redesigned Query Editor layout. Output messages are always visible while resultsets and the query editor can be resized according to the task at hand. Resultsets are now in the same tab as their generating query editor.
• Several minor changes that make the difference for a frustration-free, comfortable use of the tool. Sidebar sizes, the last selected schema and other state information is now properly remembered between sessions. Keyboard navigation of resultsets has been fixed to properly handle Tab key navigation in all platforms.
• SELECT …

I ran into an issue installing the MySQLdb module.

>>> import MySQLdb
/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.py:3: UserWarning: Module _mysql was already imported from /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.pyc, but /Users/jhaddad/Downloads/MySQL-python-1.2.3 is being added to sys.path
Traceback (most recent call last):
File ““, line 1, in
File “MySQLdb/__init__.py”, line 19, in
import _mysql
File “build/bdist.macosx-10.7-intel/egg/_mysql.py”, line 7, in
File “build/bdist.macosx-10.7-intel/egg/_mysql.py”, line 6, in __bootstrap__
ImportError: dlopen(/var/root/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg-tmp/_mysql.so, 2): Library not loaded: …