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Show HN: TablePlus – A macOS client for relational databases

333 points| bit_4l | 8 years ago |medium.com

155 comments

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[+] ble52|8 years ago|reply
Love it! Please don't bother with people who don't care about proper native experience. I've been waiting for a tool like that for sooooo long and I'm really happy to see it. I love when developers use the platform to its full extent instead fighting with it (like Electron and all rest of cross-platform approaches)

And for those whining about "macOS-only" - take a look at Tower, a Git client that was initially macOS-only as well. They later released a dedicated, native Windows version, just like the developer of TablePlus wants to do, and it's awesome. True native experience will always win in my heart with cross-platform solutions and that's where I'm putting my money.

[+] hungerstrike|8 years ago|reply
I'm happy with what I already have on Windows. I've never seen a better client than SQL Server Management Studio or SQL Server Data Tools and this tool doesn't look like it even comes close.

Honestly, I've never seen a native macOS app that I thought was any good though. That's why I typically just use them to compile my stuff for iOS. If I have to use some program on a Mac, I hope it's got a somewhat familiar interface and that's why I prefer Electron apps like VSCode on macOS.

[+] _xnmw|8 years ago|reply
Awesome! I can't believe it took this long for someone to get it right! Support for Redis too?! Finally! Navicat is great, but very expensive, and its Mac implementation is a bit slow and buggy in my experience. Definitely not a first-class citizen on Mac. DataGrip is my primary tool right now, and I had no complaints, except that it was also slow on Mac, and had no Redis support, or table structure editing. And you've solved all of that! One small tip: Advertise the WHERE filter more prominently on the homepage. Fast WHERE filtering/column selection is crucial to a productive workflow, but it took me a while to find it on your interface.
[+] modernerd|8 years ago|reply
https://tableplus.io/ for those who want to try it without reading the launch post.

Mac-only, Windows version planned. Free to download with paid upgrades giving more features: https://tableplus.io/pricing.

Looks like a good potential alternative to https://www.sequelpro.com/ (Mac and MySQL -only, donationware).

[+] eerikkivistik|8 years ago|reply
If it works as advertised, this might be one of the most pleasant surprises in a while. Will try it now. Been looking for a good alternative to pgAdmin.

Edit: Tried it out and it works really well from first impressions. Would definitely recommend trying it out as an alternative to pgAdmin.

[+] memco|8 years ago|reply
Wow, pretty nice so far. Sequel Pro has been my main workhorse, but the fact that it's MySQL only has often left me looking for other tools.

It would be great to see better support for relationships and triggers and such like Sequel pro, but I like what it has so far in the structure view. I think the idea of the colored connection status bar, but it would be good to see some sort of logic for coloring the text on top to match or at least contrast sufficiently (something like how iTunes did it[0] would be awesome).

Lastly, better import/export would be nice. You can export and specify a few options but it would be good to see a little more full featured (see also Sequel Pro).

The price point seems reasonable too. Honestly, it feels a little awkward that Theming (even using alternating row colors) is a paid feature, but it probably will generate sales as I am inclined to use it immediately just to get rid of the popups.

[0] https://panic.com/blog/itunes-11-and-colors/

[+] dancek|8 years ago|reply
I've been using DataGrip by JetBrains for a while now. I have no qualms with it, but the price would be an issue if I didn't have the full JetBrains pack already from my employer.

What is the killer feature of TablePlus? Should I try it even though I'm happy with DataGrip? Or is it just as good for a lower price?

https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/

[+] turtlebits|8 years ago|reply
DataGrip has one of the worst UI's (if not the worst) I've ever used.

If you create a new database (not using Datagrip), it won't show up in until you go manually enable it to be shown. I ran into so many issues wondering why my created databases didn't show up. (while spamming the refresh button in the toolbar). And ended up spending extra time to verify that they were there

Eventually figured out the setting is hidden in the context menu for a connection. Right click -> Database Tools (click). Get a new popup -> Manage Shown Schemas.

And the kicker is that it's not intuitively named AND hidden under a separate UI element. After not using DataGrip for a while, I end up spending a bunch of time digging through context menus trying to find it again.

[+] no_gravity|8 years ago|reply
I would like to stay in the terminal even when working on a DB. But I never found a decent terminal based DB client with a GUI (TUI?). So I am writing my own at the moment. A terminal based database editor. It's a bit like vim for databases.

If you too are interested in such a thing, let me know.

[+] cdubzzz|8 years ago|reply
DBCLI[0] offers some decent solutions (although definitely not "vim for databases"), have you played around with them? I have used and liked pgcli and mycli, but haven't used them extensively by any means.

I'd be interested to hear more about what you are working on.

[0] http://www.dbcli.com/

[+] huyphams|8 years ago|reply
A tool will never be a silver bullet. Somebody has a dozen of connections in staging, production, testing and many places. They have history and some strict mode prevents the human mistake (warning, prompt for the password before executing queries). That why we need GUI tool.
[+] rabidrat|8 years ago|reply
Have you seen VisiData[0]? It supports Postgres and sqlite at the moment (read-only). Do you want more than simple editing of fields and deleting of rows?

[0] http://visidata.org

[+] dsego|8 years ago|reply
Been using it for a month now and I love the modern sleek interface. It's very similar to Postico (which is Postgres only unfortunately). One killer feature for me is that you can assign colors to connections. When you open a window this color is prominently displayed at the top, very useful for distinguishing production and dev. ⌘+P command prompt is also supported, like in Sublime Text. Some nice touches is that you can assign custom icons to connections and that empty space is filled with cute drawings. One thing I miss is that if you don't specify a DB in the connection info, the main window doesn't list all the available DBs, you have to ⌘+K to get the selection panel.
[+] tijs|8 years ago|reply
Postico is great but it does seem to hang/crash with big operations quite often. From my quick tests it does not seem like TablePlus has similar issues which is fantastic.
[+] DanHulton|8 years ago|reply
I'm just trying it out now and it seems juuust nicer than Postico, yeah (which you can also assign colours to, I should say), but that ⌘+P thing just blew me away.
[+] tieubao|8 years ago|reply
You have pointed out all the killer features. Btw the hotkeys won me.
[+] hammerbrostime|8 years ago|reply
Wow, I am so excited about this app. I have to wonder, how come the market hasn't supported something like this in the past - or more specifically - why hasn't SequelPro thrived and evolved to eventually support Postgres? Are developers too cheap?
[+] bit_4l|8 years ago|reply
Well, that's the downside of open source, you can't really demand for quick support & development. When we waited for so long, we needed to build it ourselves.
[+] 1_player|8 years ago|reply
Thanks! I love Sequel Pro but multi-clause filters are a pain with it, and I'm never able to save my queries and have them available the next time I use the app.

Great job, I'll probably buy it after a few weeks of testing!

EDIT: love the commit feature. Not a fan of the cloud account thing, but the app still works without creating any.

[+] jason_slack|8 years ago|reply
I like what TablePlus is offering. My question is the price. $69 isn't horrible, but it is still a lot. Is this one time $69 with a long path of free upgrades or is this $69 once a year like other software I use (VMWare Fusion, Office, etc).
[+] bengotow|8 years ago|reply
$69 is chump change - Navicat is like $1,000. I worry that it's not enough for the app to be maintained for a long time after purchase.

I'd pay $69/year without even thinking about it, maybe they should jump on the subscription train!

[+] thecatspaw|8 years ago|reply
it is "You only pay once and keep using the app forever, but you can only upgrade the app for the first year after you purchased."
[+] apocalip|8 years ago|reply
Compared to Navicat Premium this is basically free... Navicat Premium for similar amounts of Database Systems currently costs 1299$ even Navicat Essentials costs 199$ And to top it off you can even use TablePlus for free if you accept some Limits!
[+] zepolen|8 years ago|reply
I love it, while it clearly gets 'inspiration' from Postico - (not a bad thing, Postico's interface is awesome) - the fact that it supports all databases and even redis support planned is making me a customer.
[+] bit_4l|8 years ago|reply
and I love making you a customer :D
[+] cturner|8 years ago|reply
There is a certain difficult to describe joy about tight native development. Ignore the haters, congrats on your release.
[+] alienreborn|8 years ago|reply
Thank you for this. If there is one area where there is a dearth of tools it's universal SQL workbenches. Only tool that's worth considering till now is Datagrip and now this looks promising.
[+] avdempsey|8 years ago|reply
This looks pretty sweet so far. I love having multiple panes, multiple tabs, and good shortcuts. When you click on a row it also appears in a vertical orientation in the sidebar on the right, that's a nice touch.

Today, I use mysql in the terminal most of the time. The main reason I've been using the terminal instead of SequelPro is my terminal has the scrollback available from my previous queries. This is great for comparing results, printing out a few table schemas to help write a query, and acting as kind of a log of my thought process. Terminal has a lot of other disadvantages, but I've accumulated a lot of tricks to mitigate them.

A nice implementation of tabs and panes could chip-away at that advantage, definitely, so this app is exciting. One limitation in the current implementation is it looks like table views need to take up the whole tab. It would be nice to have a table view in one pane, and a query editor in the next.

The app has a nice query history sidebar. In addition to the query, it has the timestamp; my terminal doesn't have that. Could this concept be expanded to include query results? My first instinct was also to try dragging and dropping one of the queries from my history into the desired pane. That didn't work, but its behavior of adding it to the pane where the cursor was last works well.

All in all, I think this will definitely find a regular place in my tool set; thank you for making something cool!

[+] Mister_Snuggles|8 years ago|reply
I work at an Oracle shop, so this doesn’t work for me right now, but I’m looking forward to playing with it once Oracle support comes out.
[+] bit_4l|8 years ago|reply
It's on the roadmap and will be rolled out soon.
[+] pjmlp|8 years ago|reply
Looks quite nice.

Currently stuck on pgAdmin 1.22, as I won't touch the "modern" Electron version of it.

[+] dotdi|8 years ago|reply
Well done!

Now I wish I had something as fancy for my meek Linux box.

[+] cpursley|8 years ago|reply
This is timely! I spend all of yesterday setting up a Windows 10 VM just to have access to MSMS. The existing field of macOS MSSQL clients are light on features, including Microsoft own cross-platform SQL Operations Studio.

Question: Does TablePlus have a way to create a linked_server via the GUI?: https://www.sqlshack.com/how-to-create-and-configure-a-linke...

[+] fibers|8 years ago|reply
How is this better than DBeaver
[+] dlandis|8 years ago|reply
It doesn't even seem close to DBeaver at this point, but who knows how it will progress. DBeaver is Java-based but still runs very fast on my Mac. Definitely the best db client I've used in years.
[+] huyphams|8 years ago|reply
It's native, super fast, clean and beautifier. DBBeaver is esclipse + plugins.
[+] bit_4l|8 years ago|reply
take start-up time for example. I'm not sure about DBeaver but Navicat takes 6 seconds, TablePlus takes 0.5 seconds