15 years on and no progress

[Arkady Bron]

I last used MySQL workbench about 15 years ago, and I can't say that it was an auspicous encounter. It was clunky, badly designed, kept crashing and generally difficult to set up and work with.

I recently completed a project that interfaces with local access dBases and MS-SQL server dBases. At the 11th hour, my client requested that it should also be able to work with MySQL dBases. It took me about 3 hours to write the classes required in my projects DAL and with that done a I set up a MySQL server instance on my production server so that I could begin testing and tweaking the new feature.

I downloaded and installed workbench, to begin configuration and to migrate one of my test databases to begin testing.

To my utter dismay, I discover that this tool has not progressed in any meaningful way since I last used it.

It crashed 5 times when trying to connect to my server instance, it is generally just as badly designed and implemented as it was 15 years ago. I have wasted half a day trying get it to connect to either a local access dB; which apparently can only be achieved using ODBC, which is not working on a 64 bit machine for reasons??? And when trying to connect to a running MySQL server instance it crashes/ or stops, without error reporting or explanation of any kind.

Quite frankly I am appalled. I give up.