While reworking our initial code completion implementation in MySQL Workbench I developed an approach that can potentially be applied for many different situations/languages where you need code completion. The current implementation is made for the needs of MySQL Workbench, but with some small refactorings you can move out the MySQL specific parts and have a clean core implementation that you can easily customize to your needs.

Since this implementation is not only bound to MySQL Workbench I posted the full description on my private blog.

Some years ago I posted an article about the code size in the MySQL Workbench project and talked a bit about the different subprojects and modules. At that time the project consisted of ~400K LOC (including third-party code) and already then the parser was the second biggest part with nearly a forth of the size of the entire project. This parser project back then used the yacc grammar from the MySQL server codebase and was our base for all parsing tasks in the product. Well, things have changed a lot since these days and this blog post discusses the current parsing infrastructure in MySQL Workbench.

We started looking into a more flexible way of creating our parser infrastructure. Especially the generation of lexer and parser from the grammar was a long …

Direct Schema Tree Action Buttons

The schema tree in the SQL Editor now has some very convenient buttons for accessing the most used functions for each object type:

• Table or Schema Inspector
• Object structure editor
• Table data browser/editor
• Call Stored Procedure or Function

Format Note Objects in Diagrams

Note objects in diagrams can now be resized and have its contents automatically rearranged. You can also change style attributes like font, background color and text color.

Other improvements and bug fixes that make a difference

MySQL password is remembered for the session, even if not …

Improved Visual Explain

In MySQL 5.7, the Optimizer Team has been doing great work in refactoring as well as innovation with the new Cost Model. The improved Visual Explain enables the DBA to now get deeper insights into Optimizer decision making, for improved performance tuning of queries.   The UI was also improved to allow easier navigation in large query plans.

Streamlined Query Results Panel

The query results panel was updated to centralize the many features related to result sets into a single location. Result Grid, Form Editor, Field Types, Query Stats, Execution Plan (including the traditional and Visual Explain) and the new Spatial Viewer are all easily accessible from a single interface.

Run SQL …

The Spatial Viewer

MySQL 5.7 will include much awaited GIS support for InnoDB tables. To make it easier to quickly visualize spatial/geometry data in geographic context, Workbench 6.2 includes a viewer for resultsets containing that type of data. The viewer will render data from each row as a separate clickable element. When clicked, you can view the rest of the data from that row in the textbox. If you have multiple queries with geometry data, you can overlay them in the same map.

But that’s not all the features. The Spatial Data Viewer give you the possibility to display the data using different projection systems. Right now you can use Robinson, Mercator, Equirectangular, Bonne. There’s option to even merge different resultsets, execute all of them and switch to …

MySQL Workbench has an option to view MySQL server variables divided into groups [img. 1], for example: Binlog, General, Keycache, Performance, etc. This is okay if we just wanted to look around, but it can become overwhelming as sometimes we only want to monitor specific variables from different groups.

img.1. Server Variables main view

In MySQL Workbench 6.1, we solve this by implementing Custom Groups. It’s a special group that can be created by the user. At the end of the Category List, there is already one defined group, called Custom. When selected, you’ll find a description in the Variable List [img. 2].

img. 2. Server Variables custom group

Variable grouping …

The SQL Editor in MySQL Workbench 6.1 adds a new interface for query results.  This addition offers 4 new views to your query results, 2 for the result data itself and 2 for meta-information about the query that was executed.

Query Result Set Grid

The traditional result set grid. Run a SELECT query on a table with a primary key and you can edit the data. You must click the Edit button to enter edit mode.

Note: Until Workbench 6.1.1, the check was being done automatically for every SELECT query, but since that requires extra queries to MySQL, the check is now done on demand.

Result Set Form Editor

The new form editor for result sets comes in handy when you want to closely inspect the fields of each record (specially if it has multi-line text). You …

MySQL Workbench have one nice feature which is probably a stranger for some of us. The name of this feature is vertical query output, it help in situations where the standard Workbench output will not be very useful. This functionality is very easy to use and in this post I’ll try to visualize some of it’s benefits.

First we need to know how to use it, so we’ve provided you two options to execute the query with vertical output. One of them is the menu bar where you can find item named Execute vertically, you’ll also find hint about the shortcut for that option it’s CTRL+ALT+RETURN.

After you know how to get the vertical query output, I’ll show you some screen shots to compare it with command line output.

Let’s take the command that suits best to this type of output, it’s SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS. Normally to understand the output, you probably copy it to some notepad app, and …

Do you know this scenario: you are writing down  a stored procedure but you can’t for the life of you remember the exact syntax of that CASE statement? Has it to end with CASE or not? Can I use more than one WHEN part and how should that be written? Usually you end up opening a web page and read through the excellent MySQL online docs. However, this might cost too much time if you quickly need different statements and other detail info. Here’s where MySQL Workbench’s context help jumps in.

The server can help

It’s probably only known to the die-hard terminal operators who write most of their SQL queries in a MySQL console window: the MySQL server already has a stripped down set of help topics produced by the Docs team. That means you can always get at least the syntax but often far more information for a particular syntax element when you work with a server. When you …

scr 1. Location of Search table data on the main toolbar

One of the new features of MySQL Workbench 6.0 is Table Data Search. The main purpose of this was to ease data searching through the whole instance. Previously, we needed to use some tricks to get the query to run over all schemas that we’ve got on the server. Now it’s easy to find the searched term with much less hassle. This functionality is easy to use and provides searching through all columns and even all types. However, we can’t forget that due to the nature of this tool we must take some precautions to not overload your server.

To use this functionality we pick it up from the Database menu called “Search Table Data…” or just click the icon on the main toolbar (scr 1). The third option is to select …