MySQL support in NetBeans 6.1

I was going to blog about this, but James beat me to it.

Thanks, James! I think he covers it really well.

I just wanted to comment on why we did this. It's nothing that revolutionary, but if you have MySQL installed on your machine, then these features can help you to get started very quickly. In particular, you can get a connection to MySQL very quickly and start exploring, and you can easily create the sample databases used by tutorials and blogs throughout NetBeans.

Other things of note that didn't make it into the beta but will be there by the time NetBeans 6.1 releases:

• I fixed a bug so that you can again create stored procedures and triggers in the SQL editor. This broke a when we started executing each statement separately. No, if you say 'delimiter X' where X is any string besides ';', then the semi-colons inside the procedure/trigger definition won't confuse our parser. This is the same approach used by the mysql command-line tool

• I'll be putting up a module in NetBeans update center that will make it very easy to create the Sakila sample database in NetBeans

What about the next release of NetBeans? Well, that depends on a lot of things, including what results from my discussions with the MySQL team, what I hear from you, and how many people are available to contribute. Two things I'm thinking about are improving our SQL editing support (including some support embedded within the PHP and Java code editors) and, thinking big here, some form of database schema refactoring.