Visual Explain

MySQL Workbench includes Visual Explain, which can help make more complicated execution plans more human readable. Internally this feature is powered by EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON, so it is important to note that Visual Explain will not have any features over a regular EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON. In fact, for simplicity it omits some of the output, such as the use of covering indexes.

Visual Explain color codes the access methods:

• ref is green
• range is orange
• ALL (table scan) and INDEX (index scan) are red

As we’ve seen in the examples so far, this is perhaps a small simplification since highly selective ranges are more desirable than low selectivity ref accesses.