The MySQL Developer Tools team is known for their steady release cycle, putting out a new MySQL Workbench release every 4-5 weeks. Now that it has been a bit quiet for a while you may wonder what is going on. Let me share some inside knowledge of what’s happening behind the scenes.

MySQL Workbench is a key component of our MySQL stack and extremely popular as shown by download numbers and interest in our white papers. It is the face of MySQL on the desktop, and we aim to make it even more popular for developers & DBAs than it is today. We have been looking for strong C++ and Python developers to grow the team further, and I’m happy to welcome Marcin Szalowicz from Poland and Miguel Tadeu from Portugal who started this Monday. They are going to work on both, the C++ backend and the native UI frontend of the product.

For some time the focus for the team has been on the next major release of MySQL Workbench which will be called 6.0. If you are familiar with the current version (5.2) you are going to see that we have been listening carefully to the feedback we’ve got. Here are the main areas that have been improved.

Simplified Workflow

The current WB 5.2 UI was designed for three specific workflows, SQL Development, EER Modelling and Administration. This is represented by the 3 main areas of the WB 5.2 Home screen and makes good sense if you have a very specific role in your company and use WB for that specific purpose, e.g. Administration of MySQL servers. What we learned is that e.g. many developers working in the SQL Editor also want to perform administrative tasks on their development machines and therefore also open an Administrator session. The same is true for DBAs using the SQL Editor to run scripts and queries.

For that reason we have unified SQL Development & Administration and made both available in a single session when you connect to your MySQL Server. The connections now take the main area of the new, redesigned WB 6.0 Home screen. We have also adopt a modern looking UI.

Enterprise Feature Support

MySQL Enterprise Backup and the new Audit Log functionality found in MySQL 5.6 Enterprise are very compelling features for our customers. We got many requests to deliver a streamlined GUI for these features that will now be released as part of WB 6.0. MySQL Workbench will perform all tasks that are needed to configure your MySQL installation for the use of the backup feature and setting up an incremental backup is now as easy as clicking a button.

Improved Code Quality

Another area of focus was to improve the quality of the product. WB 6.0 will contain over 100 bug fixes and will be tested by a dedicated QA team. We are soon going to launch the public Beta test phase and with the help of the MySQL community the WB 6.0 will be the best MySQL Workbench release to date.

More Than 50 Improvements

Apart from working on the major UI changes a lot of work has been invested in improving and extending existing features like Server Status overview, Visual Explain, Editors, Schema Inspector, Table Data Search, and much more.

I hope you got interested in the upcoming MySQL Workbench 6.0 release and you will join the Beta test when it is first announced.