MySQL Workbench Query Browser is super slow

MySQL GUI Tools which included the MySQL Query Browser and MySQL Administrator has now been replaced by the MySQL Workbench tool.

The Workbench edition which includes Query Browser (now called SQL Development) and Administrator (now called Server Administration) is only available in beta but it the old MySQL GUI Tools have already been pulled from Downloads. So I downloaded the latest beta version of MySQL Workbench 5.2.20 and gave it a try.

I’m sorry to say I was very disappointed.

This is what I have found using the SQL Development part (former Query Browser)

  1. It is super slow. Doing a query that usually takes a second in the old Query Browser can take minutes! These are just simple queries and it seems the time is not the query itself or time to fetch from server that makes it slow. This alone makes it impossible to use this tool.
  2. It is not intuitive. I find it hard to work with, maybe it just takes getting used to
  3. Features and functions from the Query Browser are gone, for example in Query Browser it was possible to open up a new tab to run a new query, you could then switch between tabs to see the different results. In the new SQL Development you can open up new query tabs but there is only one results tab. Another thing is that it does not show how many rows were affected by your query. Yet another missing feature is the ease to edit a row, in the old Query Browser all you did was click the Edit button. In the new SQL Development you have to do a specific “EDIT” query (which is even slower than the super slow SELECT) and then go thru several “ok” screens before your edit is finally written to database. I’m also missing is the system Tray Monitor and the Migration Toolkit.

I know it’s only a beta so hopefully they will get these things working in the end but for now I’m going to stick to the old Query Browser.

After some searching I found the old GUI Tools in the MySQL Download Archives.
It seems the latest/last version of GUI Tools was 5.1.12 and can be downloaded here.

10 comments

  1. I agree with you and it is going worst with the updates, I am now using 5.2.44 and it is slower than slow. I am really frustrated!

  2. MySqlWorbench is very slow, because of completion is activated.
    Desactivated it , and all ‘ll be fine.

    NB : I use database of 100 tables

  3. “MySqlWorbench is very slow, because of completion is activated.”

    What does this mean and how do I change it? I’m running 5.2.45 with about 25 small tables and it’s very very slow.

  4. Menu: Edit/Preferences/SQL Editor
    disable check box ‘enable code completion in editors’

    Scrolling speed is much, much higher without this function! But since I just tried it myself I cannot say, if the SQL speed itself is improved too.

    Norman

  5. Thanks Norman,

    Actually I had already unticked the box but it is still almost unusably slow. It may have speeded up a bit but I’m not sure.

    I have 11 small databases where the speed is acceptable. The twelth is bigger (25 tables compared to 12) and it’s this one that is horribly slow.

  6. I have about 200 tables, with some 15 GB total – and the workbench wasn’t useable at all before. (Scrolling speed in the results windows was about 1 row / second). Now it is useable, but still not as fast as is the old QueryBrowser. You may gain some more speed if you disable the ‘warp cell content’ function.

    Regarding the ‘fetching’ speed: I have not compared exact times, but I think it’s about the same as with the QueryBrowser, here for example 6 seconds for 1.7 million rows.

    By the way, since yesterday i use workbench 6.0.6 – maybe the speedup with the auto-completion just works with that version?

  7. I just downloaded the latest MySQL Workbench (6.2.3.12.312), and connected to an older version of MySQL Server (ver. 5.0.51b-community-nt).
    The times for the actual queries are reported as fast (0.001 s and similar) in the lower right corner, but the time for even fairly small resultsets 400 rows with 20-30 fields take almost two seconds to show in the grid. It was lightning fast in the old MySQL Query Browser, which I’m going to revert to now.

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