There is a saddening shortage of proper MySQL administration/query browser tools on linux-based systems. MySQL Workbench is a free tool that consolidates what used to be MySQL Query Browser and the MySQL Administrator and introduces a data modelling editor that promises round-trip design and generation of DBs.

It’s great news that Workbench is being implemented and made available to the public for free, yet I can’t avoid comparing it to some of the existing solutions for other platforms.

While it’s easy to justify why Query Browser of old sucked — it was an old application that was being marginally maintained in the last several years — it’s hard to do so for a new piece of software like Workbench. Its query browser sucks, not just because of its implementation (slow, occasionally crashing, often providing inconsistent/misleading data), but also because it betrays bad design at every corner; design of the sort that disregards usability and tries to shoehorn user interaction to a flawed model chosen because it suited some developer during implementation.

The Workbench developers seem open to suggestions, and in this light I can only provide a concise piece of advice for their query browser development effort: find a Mac, download Sequel Pro, use it and then copy the damn thing: It works, it’s many times faster, more usable, covers more use-cases and is much more painless, plus it’s free and open source. Sadly, it’s not available on linux, for if it did, I wouldn’t touch Workbench with a three point oh-five metre pole.

Just a few weeks after Tiger was announced in 2004, I was chatting with a friend about how I thought Core Image could revolutionise the bitmap editing capabilities of applications on Mac OS X and, of course, how this would translate into an abundance of competitive image manipulation/editing applications making use of Apple’s optimised routines, the GPU etc. For a while I even toyed with the idea of writing one myself, as I had grown tired of Photoshop Elements, annoyed with Photoshop’s price tag and frustrated with GIMP’s unusable, nonsensical UI. Upon getting Tiger, in spring 2005, I spent some time looking at the example code and putting together some primitive Cocoa application that could more or less apply Apple’s ready made effects, in addition to doing some basic transformation of an image. My efforts were purely an academic exercise, getting myself familiar with some of Apple’s new APIs and playing around with a brand new version of XCode and the system frameworks. Obviously I couldn’t have been the only one and fortunately for us the efforts of others were bound to become much more than dusty old code in some src folder in a home directory.
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