I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. I’ve been using DBDesigner 4 from FabForce, an open source visual design tool, and apart from working around a number of bugs, I’ve found it practical to design from scratch. The big plus, it works under Linux.

With the announcement that this was being incorporated into MySQL, called MySQL Workbench, I was looking forward to getting my hands on it. I guess that was about 8 months ago. Finally about 6 weeks ago, Version 1.0.0-alpha was released for Linux. Unfortunately it didn’t work, would not even start for me. Logged as Bug #15421, which got marked as a duplicate of Bug #15218 (I could have sworn I did a search first). Anyway, this got promptly closed as Unable to reproduce, but I see it’s finally been reopened again.

Windows is at 1.0.2, Mac OS/X is at 1.0.3-alpha, and yet linux is still at 1.0.0-alpha. What gives? There seems to be a clear lack of communication as to what’s going on.

The problem is, I’m preparing presentatations for the Brisbane MySQL Users Group, and the MySQL User Conference, and I want to import an existing MySQL database into a modeling tool to generate diagrams. It seems that DBDesigner4 is not MySQL 5 friendly, and given it’s not supported anymore where do you turn.

In DBDesigner, I get the error. “dbExpress error: Invalid Username/password”. Upteen double checks and then searching on the web finally leads to
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?113,32121,57081#msg-57081, and the trick SET PASSWORD FOR ‘some_user’@’some_host’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘newpwd’);

So now I can get a connection to the database, there ain’t no model to import. It seems I’m now forced to go look elsewhere for a open-source and free modelling tool that runs under Linux.

Ultimately I can’t really complain, this is the primary problem with Open Source, on one side, it’s Free, the other side support, documentation and help can be a hit and miss affair, and there are no commitments to a release schedule or feedback as there is no money involved.

Still if after all this time, I’m forced to go out and buy a product, it will be a great shame.