We are about to release the next Beta version of MySQL Workbench. There are no new additions like in the last release. This will strictly be a bug-fix build. Apart from several smaller fixes this build will see an improved software rendering performance. Alfredo has blogged about the changes in his last post. And the changes are really paying off. Tax tested it on several machines and found the speed to be acceptable even on older machines.

The slow and flickering software rendering has been one of the major points of complain (except from the yet missing Linux and OS X versions that will be released later this year). Now that this is out of the way we are marching towards the RC level, fast.

If there are no new obstacles the release build will happen later today. Markus from the web team will get online on Saturday or early Sunday to update the download pages. Then we will send out the announce emails asap.

From time to time it is necessary to get a bigger picture of your project in terms of size, test coverage, code vs. comments ratio and others (aka metrics). While it is quite difficult to find a good (and free) code coverage tool for C++ there is already a very nice tool package called DPack, which is not only freely available but also gives us some very useful additions in our IDE. One of those features is code statistics.

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We are working hard on the next Workbench Beta release that should be out mid next week. It will include a list of top priority bug fixes as usual but also two new additions that have been requested by our beta testers.

The new Online Update menu item allows to update your current installation to the latest available release right from within the tool. No need manually browse web pages anymore - at least if you are using the MSI based packages. The reason we are not offering this for the zip packages is that an automatic update is tricky since you might have made a custom install based on your needs. If you are using the zip packages you can keep using the normal Version Check menu item that will inform you about the version you have installed and if a new release is available.

The second addition is a better reporting after schema diffs. We added the templating engine (thanks Google for ctemplate!) …

The Lua plugin support has been finally fixed and will be working in the next release. Together with a few other improvements, it’s now possible to write your own commands to do all kinds of tasks. Documentation for the plugin system is not yet written (and the previous one is outdated), but it should be straightforward to copy the supplied Lua plugin and change it to do something else. All you need is to know a little Lua (which is a simple scripting language) and explore Workbench internals using the GRT Shell (View -> Advanced -> GRT Shell).The sample Lua plugin is located in the modules folder. You can copy it to the custom plugins folder which is shown in the GRT Shell at startup and change things like the module name and add your own functions. I’ll write more about how to write such functions in a future post, like after the next WB is actually released.There are a few ways that plugins …

I’ve just tried to run PHP with MySQL on my Leopard and the first problem: “Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/mysql/mysql.sock’”

I’ve just changed php.ini to:
mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
The same situation with mysqli settings - be default it is not set so you should update it to the real path.
And it works!

Apart from more than 60 bug fixes the upcoming MySQL Workbench 5.0.11 release will contain a few major improvements in respect to the last release two weeks ago.

• The partitioning settings are now fully supported during reverse engineering of SQL scripts and live database and CREATE / ALTER generation for synchronizations. We had a preliminary implementation but this has been replaced by full parser support.
• Addition of Standard Insert grid input. Instead of having to type in the full INSERT statements the initial/test data can now be entered by using a data grid.
• Improved formatting of generated SQL output.
• Improved GRT Shell console. This is in preparation of the upcoming tutorials on the scripting- and plugin writing possibilities

The show-stopper bug that is holding back the release is now fixed. We will run detailed tests tomorrow and if nothing else comes up will upload to the …

I prepared the release builds for 5.0.11 yesterday evening and they have been uploaded to the mirrors. All automated tests passed without error and my initial manual tests showed everything working. Nevertheless Tax found a show-stopper bug later today following our manual testing procedures.

The problem is located in the SQL generation code for tables. We introduced a new internal index type for foreign key index columns that is maintained automatically by the tool. This new type caused the generated SQL to be corrupt. We tried a simply fix today but were not able to fully solve it. We will take time tomorrow to properly fix the issue and I will trigger new build after that. Then it will take about 20h till the mirrors have catched up and we can announce the new release.

Sorry for the delay.

We are working hard on the next release of MySQL Workbench and are trying to follow our plan of getting a release out every second week. A lot of things have already been addressed, some new things came up. But we are clearly moving into the right direction and our investments in unit tests and UI tests seems to pay off as expected. More details in a post later this week.

Sheeri wrote a post (now a 404 error) referring to Maatkit on Ohloh, which I have never heard of before. I took a look at what Ohloh thinks about Maatkit. It's kind of neat. Beyond just the obvious "social website" stuff that's all the rage these days, it actually looks at the project's SVN history, analyzes the codebase, and so on.

It also estimates 8 person-years of work have gone into the project, and says that at $55,000/year it would cost $450,702 to write the code as it currently exists, which is kind of funny. It took me a whole lot less than 8 years to write. (Perhaps this is why that salary strikes me as unrealistic).

It has a couple of other interesting things, like a visual timeline of source …

Ironically, the Stream algorithm I wrote as the simplest possible syncing algorithm does what the much more efficient algorithm I wrote some time ago can't do: sync a table without a primary key, as long as there are no duplicate rows. In fact, it's so dumb, it will happily sync any table, even if there are no indexes.

The flash of inspiration I had on Friday has turned out to be good...