DBeaver – open-source database client

[staticlibs]

DBeaver works surprisingly nicely with less popular DBs. I work with Babelfish for PostgreSQL [1], it supports connections with SQL Server client libs. Most GUI client tools (like SSMS) expect "real" SQL Server on the other end of the wire - depend on various system views for DB introspection, so only partially work with Babelfish. Even if client tool is based on JDBC (like SQuirell SQL), it doesn't guarantee that this tool won't use additional SQL Server-specific queries for introspection. DBeaver is much better at this, I guess it is using JDBC API or DB-neutral INFORMATION_SCHEMA views for introspection.

[1] https://babelfishpg.org/

[zmmmmm]

I know probably 95% of HN will see it as a downside but one of my favorite things about DBeaver is that because it is implemented on Eclipse you can install nearly any Eclipse plugin and they work. So I installed Vrapper to edit in Vi-mode, some git tools I like, PlantUML, etc. Really makes it a step above other tools in terms of the power and flexibility you can have with it.

Apart from that, you can install it inside regular Eclipse as a plugin, so then you can have your database window and your ER diagram next to your code. Again, something that really sets it apart from dedicated tools.

[elric]

I love the Eclipse IDE. It's a shame the Eclipse Foundation doesn't treat it better.

Last time I tried to contribute to it, I ended up giving up. They wanted me to sign paperwork simply to report a bug. There was no documentation about how to build the IDE, which is scattered across dozens of repositories. Maybe that has improved, but I doubt it.

They seem to be putting all their eggs into the Theia basket, which is an IDE framework similar to VSCode. Would have been nice to see that energy go towards improving Eclipse instead of reinventing the wheel.

Improving the UI's handling of HiDPI would be nice. One can but dream.

[wanderingmind]

Would love to learn how you installed these plugins and tested them. Have you written about this somewhere or can you point to some resources that can help people like me, who use dbeaver but can't customize them well.

[anotherevan]

I've used Vrapper with Eclipse for years, and I've used Dbeaver for years - yet it has never entered my mind before that I could use Vrapper with Dbeaver! Thanks!

[hoistbypetard]

> one of my favorite things about DBeaver is that because it is implemented on Eclipse you can install nearly any Eclipse plugin and they work

I like DataGrip for a very similar reason, relative to IDEA plugins.

[fuzztester]

Potentially good info to know for someone using Eclipse.

[fuzztester]

Why start your comment by saying "I know probably 95% of HN will see it as a downside but"?

And this is irrespective of whether that 95% is right or not.

Google "father son and donkey story".

And re: that 95%:

See normal distribution aka bell curve.

And echo chamber and hive mind.

All of the above imply the same main point, just in different ways.

[dfee]

I don’t know why it matters to me, but I’ve always been put off by it being ugly and using non-native widgets. That may be the only reason I’ve paid for TablePlus.

I’d probably be fine with a great TUI interface, too. So it’s really this intermediate UI that irritates me.

[worble]

I find it absolutely baffling how often the prettiness of UI comes up as a HN comment.

If you asked me objectively "do you think it's pretty?" I'd probably say no, but never once has this even occurred me when using it since I'm usually just trying to get work done, which I find it very useful for. It's a productivity tool, not an art piece I'm hanging on my wall.

[pachico]

Ugliness is something I found to be quite common in Java based apps. I never understood why, though.

[staticlibs]

DBeaver uses SWT toolkit, its widgets are as platform-native as Java can do. Some of them can be much faster with long text editing than default Java Swing widgets.

[FpUser]

It is free tool with gobbles of functionality. I use it occasionally and it works great. Whatever set of widgets it uses does not concern me at all. It does what I need and is convenient enough. Maybe it would matter more if I was spending all my work time with it but in reality I use it very occasionally.

So thank to the developers.

I also use another DB admin tool: HeidiSQL. This one is lightning fast. Most likely because it is native application. Written in Delphi btw

Same thanks to the developer

[smackeyacky]

This complaint has been levelled against Java (and small talk earlier than that) since forever and it made no sense back in the 1990s either. Nobody complains about the Wild West of interfaces on web apps.

On a mobile I kind of get it because having apps work in similar ways eases the learning curve (I.e burger menus etc), but all the UI paradigms being used in dbeaver are the same as any other desktop app.

I appreciate the fact that it works identically on Linux as it does Windows (and presumably MacOS). Not even Microsoft maintain consistent use of widgets within their operating system, you still stumble across windows 3.0 looking screens in windows 11.

I say…it’s good that dbeaver eschews native widgets

[nxpnsv]

I tried tableplus, liked it, it just feels right. I reported a minor error in docs, got a friendly message and a year of license. 10/10

[elAhmo]

I am in the same position. I used Postico in the past, but unfortunately it doesn't offer support for non-Postgres databases. TablePlus has really good native UI and I wish more apps went that route as you can definitely feel a difference between a native app and something like DBeaver.

[tylerhillery]

https://harlequin.sh/ is a nice SQL IDE for you terminal (TUI)

[CalRobert]

Huh, the utilitarian UI is part of why I like it

[ramon156]

Not good at supporting GTK either, its the sole reason I do not use it on gnome

[folmar]

I've tested it since you recommend it but it seems it can't do Postgres local connection (via socket-file = the default). Not great UX on linux.

[samuelec]

I have been using it for 3 years with Postgresql and it still buggy. When the db is throwing out an error dbeaver just say that there was an error on line xx followed by java exception stactrace forcing me to login into the db via command line and figure out what is wrong myself. If you want to write and debug a stored procedure then good luck! The ui had many issues and only recently seems to be just usable. At least with Postgresql, I can't really recommend for anything too complex.

[ajsnigrutin]

For me it's buggy when it has to reconnect to something... eg. i work on something, close the laptop (suspend to mem), and the next day open it up, wait for an hour or two doing other stuff (so there's enough time to notice that the tcp session is down), and dbeaver shows a progress bar and gets stuck there, until i restart it, and click a zillion times to get to the proper psql table.

Also, the annoying 'new version,...' popups are annoying.

Otherwise, a great gui.

[cowmix]

DBeaver is amazing. As someone who needs to do adhoc querying / extracting / loading of data from any hosts of system on a daily basis - this tool has saved me over and over again.

My beef is there doesn't seem to be a way to contribute $$$ to the OS version -- except for buying/subscribing to the commercial version. Maybe I've missed some web page that explains how to do contribute -- so if anyone knows if there's a way to do that --- post it here.

[vbezhenar]

Also they made a browser database client (cloudbeaver) which is much better than pgdamin IMO. I set it for my company, so people can easily access database without creating tunnels, sharing passwords, etc. I tried pgadmin before, but it was incredibly buggy, almost unusable as a shared installation (often server would just hang until restart).

For desktop I, personally, prefer Idea Database plugin, because it's just SQL editor, but incredibly powerful one.

[joshstrange]

> For desktop I, personally, prefer Idea Database plugin, because it's just SQL editor, but incredibly powerful one.

I also quite like DataGrip (essentially a standalone of the IDEA database plugin, or maybe the plugin is a plugin version of the standalone, not sure which came first).

[overtomanu]

List of db clients I have bookmarked

https://dbeaver.io/

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/1800-database-navigator

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-devel...

http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/

https://dbgate.org/screenshots/

TUIs:

https://harlequin.sh/

https://terminaltrove.com/gobang/

Not free:

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

[KronisLV]

Some other tools I have also enjoyed:

DBVisualizer: https://www.dbvis.com/ (for exploring the schema)

Jailer: https://wisser.github.io/Jailer/ (for data browsing)

Aside from that, it's usually just been a mix of using specialized tools like MySQL Workbench, SQL Developer, pgAdmin and others, or something that tries to do it all like DataGrip.

Didn't actually find anything particularly amazing about DataGrip, but if I'm paying for the JetBrains Ultimate subscription, might as well use it because it's pretty okay.

[irq-1]

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/1800-database-navigator

This looks good. Anyone have experience with it?

[troyvit]

I'll add:

CLIs: https://www.mycli.net/ https://www.pgcli.com/

[shortrounddev2]

I use dbeaver extensively at work. I like that you can graphically edit rows and it will start those changes as a transaction, so you can hit ctrl+s to commit the changes

[cbb330]

I like dbeaver for browsing DDL, list of tables, examples of schema, data types. also, to edit a few rows here and there as a quick test/fix to something. because its easier to click around than write many 2 line sql to do the same thing.

But, I often use jupyter notebooks for the DML aspect of hard queries and data anlysis, for the power of dataframes and repeatable cells mixed with documentation and sharing.

So all that to say, anyone know if there is a DDL browser equivalent ideal for jupyter notebooks / ipywidgets?

[irjustin]

DBeaver is great, but it's so heavy/clunky on OSX. Also, 99% of the time I want 1. tables+data 2. data structure+index of table 3. search 4. sql query

DBeaver aims to be a full admin system and simply getting to the data makes me drill 3-4 levels deep in a tree and it's quite annoying that only adds to the "clunky-ness".

[mixmastamyk]

There’s an option, simple view on connection or something, that eliminates much of the hierarchy.

[deergomoo]

I’m sure some other clients do this too, but one of my favourite DBeaver features is that it will display geospatial column values in an embedded OpenStreetMap pane.

[gorm]

It's a great client and used it for years. But I have some issues. Sometimes the cursor disappear and ctrl-enter stops working. Anyone experienced something similar and know what it could be? I run on a rather minimalistic UI environment and might lack some desktop festures.

[paulryanrogers]

It's a decent free and cross platform UI. Doesn't have all the DB specific features of a tool like PG admin or MySQL Workbench. Still, I like having the same tool for all my basic needs, and only use a more specialized one where I really need it.

[anonu]

I use this successfully with different versions of postgres, SQL server, MySQL, redshift and others. Does the job.

[neals]

I use HeidiSQL for my SQL databases

[bojan]

I was forced to switch to DBeaver as HeidiSQL isn't allowed at my current employer. I miss how light Heidi is, but I'm not sure I'd switch back now I'm used to all the features DBeaver has.

[nurettin]

This is a windows program written in delphi. A fitting choice, because Delphi provides both the necessary data grid component and the syntax highlighting editor, as well as connectors to several sql databases.

A cross platform version could be written in Lazarus, with the idea that it uses less system resources than a large java program.

[frozenice]

I also use HeidiSQL almost daily. Besides MySQL / MariaDB it also can connect to MSSQL and Postgres.

I recently had to import a CSV with some million rows into MariaDB. Neither HeidiSQL nor DBeaver could do it (tried various settings). IntelliJ worked like a charm.

[deergomoo]

Have they fixed the awful stability issues and the fact that a query that takes longer than ~5s will lock up the entire application until it completes?

[Aeolun]

I use a mac and linux now. I think HeidiSQL is the thing I miss most from Windows.

[frankbreetz]

Does DBeaver have a feature similar to PGAdmin's schema diff(https://www.pgadmin.org/docs/pgadmin4/development/schema_dif...)?

I use this feature quite a bit, if DBeaver has a similar feature. I might try to make the jump.

[xnx]

Great tool. Would be nice of it associating it with .parquet files on Windows allowed DBeaver to connect to them with a double-click.

[puika]

I love dbeaver, but there's a thing that bugs me every single time. I constantly recreate databases during development, so I have to disconnect databases, then connect, then go dig inside the database tree to where I was before recreating. Am I missing some feature I don't know about?

[pritambarhate]

I use it regularly for accessing PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLight. Very happy so far. It’s regularly updated also.

[teaearlgraycold]

Dbeaver is generally great. Sometimes I have weird issues where it just can’t load data after losing connection with Postgres. It’ll act like it’s reconnecting but will invariably fail. I need to manually disconnect and reconnect to get it to work.

But otherwise it does everything I need. I install it on all of my computers.