MySql Workbench is a total waste of time

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I’ve heard a lot of good things about MySql Workbench, but now that I’ve actually used it for a project I’m amazed at how bad it is. Had I simply created my schema by typing raw SQL, or using something like phpMyAdmin, I’d have saved a lot of time. Here are all the things that MySql Workbench did wrong:

1. Incorrect foreign keys – I was often unable to use it to set foreign keys. It did not give an error message, but it would not create the foreign key, or sometimes it would create the foreign key but assign the local field to the wrong foreign field. I could then click on the wrong foreign field and try to correct the situation, but Workbench would not allow me to fix the problem – it would insist on using the wrong foreign field, no matter what I did.
2. Comments are too long – I wrote a comment for every table, to document my intentions. All of these comments were too long and needed to be re-written. Any reason why Workbench didn’t throw an error? What is the point of Workbench, if not to save time?
3. Error 1005 (errno: 150) – again, why can’t Workbench throw an error if I’m doing something wrong?
4. Names of foreign fields are not unique – why couldn’t WorkBench tell me that I’d written a non-unique name for a foreign key? Why does WorkBench allow me to create an invalid schema? What is the point of WorkBench, if not to catch errors like these?
5. Did not mark the primary key as unique. Why?
6. Allowed me to use MySql reserved keywords as names for fields in tables.

WorkBench is a total waste of time. If it’s not going to catch my mistakes, then it doesn’t save me any time relative to writing raw SQL. Creating the schema using phpMyAdmin would have been faster, since my mistakes would have been more obvious sooner.