Re: gui-tool?

Hi Mike, others,

First of all, a bit of background. I've been using MySQL regularly  
since 2000, so I've got some history here.  I'm not new to the fold.  
I'm still holding onto a copy of DBD4 somewhere. I've been using the  
GUI tools since they were first released. I've long been and continue  
to be a strong advocate for MySQL.

That said, I don't think my message was too general at all.  I quickly  
zoned in on the Mac version of the tools, which is where I experience  
problems with crashing specifically.  I use the Windows version of the  
tools as well, though not as regularly.

Mac First:
I'm not sure where the difficulties lie in the Mac tools.  They just  
crash unexpectedly.  I have to be general because I can't find  
specific reasons.  However, about 2/3 of my crashes/problems occur  
when I am modifying tables in Administrator.  I know the signs.  It  
will work fine, then I submit a change, get the "Spinning Beachball of  
Doom" and a half a second later, goodbye work.  The crashes are  
repeatable, because if I make the same table modification it will do  
the same thing. I resort to building the change in Administrator, then  
copy and pasting the SQL into a terminal.  I've tried to be a good OSS  
user and reported bugs on this in the past.  They seem to get fixed,  
then they reappear in later releases.  I think they must be related,  
perhaps an uncaught exception.  For what its worth, I've not had any  
problems using the account tools.  They make sense to me and work fine  
as far as I can tell. Sure beats writing GRANT statements.  Query  
Analyzer seems more solid (again on the mac).  I've had it crash while  
running queries but not as frequently.  Again, certain queries seem to  
do the job.  My most common problem (not involving a crash) involves  
errors with connections being out of sync. (I can try to replicate the  
error).

Windows:
As was mentioned, the Windows tools seem to be very stable in terms of  
not crashing.  I can't recall problems.  However, I have noticed  
inconsistencies (not related to the Win vs. Mac UI).  The same  
commands have generated different SQL.  I've seen different ON clause  
syntax, uses of ISNULL() vs IS NULL, back-ticking of objects,  
parenthesis, JOIN synonyms, etc, from the same version of the tools on  
both platforms.  I can't imagine that maintaining the same tools on  
different platforms is easy, but there have been some pretty  
noticeable SQL code differences.

I'm going to stop here. My point is that I've run into bumps.  Most of  
them on the Mac, which is my main development platform.  While the  
proportion of Mac users to PC users is small in the general public,  
the ratio is much larger in the OSS world.  I'm basing this on my last  
four years of attendance at OSCON. Easily 50% of the laptops at OSCON  
the last two years were PowerBooks G4s and MacBookPros.  This tells me  
that there are probably quite a few GUI tools users on the Mac.

What does this mean to me?  First, I think that the MySQL team is an  
awesome group, which has made an amazing impact on the software  
community as a whole in the face of some major challenges.  I'm happy  
to see continued development in the realm of functionality, new DB  
engines, and tools (like Workbench).  I will continue to advocate for  
MySQL.  I will also try to be a better OSS steward by filing more bug  
reports.  However, I have to consider my audience.  I'm scaling MySQL  
use to the enterprise level at the University of Washington.  The  
mainstream is far less patient.

One final word: In 9 years, using numerous versions on numerous  
platforms, I've had the MySQL server daemon crash on me once that I  
can remember, and it was on windows, under heavy load and there was no  
corruption.  All for free. Free as in Freedom. That's pretty amazing.

Kind Regards,
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Brandon K. Whitehead
Director, Academic Personnel Information Services
University of Washington
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On Jan 10, 2009, at 1:22 AM, Mike Lischke wrote:

> Hey Brandon,
>
>> I've been using the GUI tools for quite some time, and I find them
>> to be unstable at best. (Sorry MySQL guys.) Specifically, they crash
>> a lot for no apparent reason on my Mac.  I've tried multiple
>> versions of the tools on multiple version of MacOS.
>
> I'm sad to hear you have so many problems with the tools on Mac, but
> please be careful not to generalize too much. The GUI tools are very
> stable on Windows and the bug report inflow for serious bugs has been
> very low for quite some time already.
>
> Mike
> --
> Mike Lischke, Senior Software Engineer
> Database Group, Developer Tools
> Sun Microsystems Inc., www.sun.com
>

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