Devit!

I first looked at this tool a number of months ago when it was still in alpha stage. The alpha version didn’t work too well…actually not at all for me.  Recently I noticed they were up to release candidate 1 so I decided to give it another try. I had high hopes as I have always found the ability to visualize a database design with all relationships a huge bonus. There are other tools to do this but I was excited to see what MySQL’s official rendition would be like.

I’ve only used it briefly but in my first run through I was impressed. I had an existing MySQL database structure that someone else had built but I was now working on. I knew the basic structure of the site but was having trouble understanding the different relationships between the tables.

At this point I should mention that MySQL Workbench has 2 versions. The first is the open source version which can be freely downloaded and used within GPL restrictions. The 2nd is a commercial version which brings some added functionality for a yearly subscription fee. Unless you’re dealing with enterprise level database design, the open source version should suffice.

I first had to export my database with the MySQL Administrator GUI tool’s backup function. This gave me a single script describing my entire database. Then I fed that file into the “Reverse Engineer MySQL create script” import feature of MySQL Workbench. After trying the “Autoplace object in new diagram” function once I determined it wasn’t really that useful as it just created a huge blob of tables.

Diagrams seem to be the most useful for me. You can create any number of diagrams in a project with different layouts of any of the tables. I decided to create a diagram that specifically showed the relationship of users and their associated data.

MySQL workbench just recently went into GA (General Availability) as a full release. This tool is essential for anyone does any level of database design with MySQL. Two thumbs up!

Jeremy

Jeremy has a love hate relationship with computers , and in contemplative moments he has been known to muse on the fact that his life’s work is in reality a long string of 1’s and 0’s. When he’s not banging code into his keyboard at work, Jeremy is banging out beats for his band “Sad Skelton” that you can check out at www.sadskelton.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Devit!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.