Show HN: DBDelve – Open-Source DB Client Made with Rust and GPUI

66 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by shayan_abbas

Item id: 50427934

22 Comments

mamcx

an hour ago

One thing missing in all the GUI clients I know for Postgres's is being able to work with composite types and filtering them like `(IMT, 1)`. Similar as edit things like this, arrays, json, etc

exaroth

2 hours ago

Whats the advantage of this over something like dbx (https://github.com/t8y2/dbx)?

shayan_abbas

2 hours ago

DBX is great but it uses tauri, it is better than using jvm and electron but still doesn't provide the performance gains GPUI does or any other native framework would do.

mbreese

2 hours ago

Performance is a hard sell when most of the time is going to be spend waiting on the DB for queries, isn't it? (compared to dbx - anything in Java is going to naturally be larger for this).

Or are you thinking of performance in terms of UX when browsing the result-sets?

But, congrats on the project. It looks great. I can't wait to try it.

shayan_abbas

2 hours ago

Yes, the slow queries stay but there are some differences:

Same result set where other clients can crash, this scrolls smoothly so you can naturally load a bigger result set in the app than other clients would allow you to, It paints the UI considerably faster than DBeaver on my benchmarks, thats after the query has run. Memory footprint for the same result is considerably lower.

Basically, your db client can slow you down even after you have waited for queries so this will fix that.

dubcanada

2 hours ago

So your main sell on DBDelve is performance?

shayan_abbas

2 hours ago

Yes, and UX. Doing the fundamental things but doing them really well. I like zed's approach where they were slow to add features and weren't/aren't at feature parity with VSCode but the point was to get out of the way for most of your workflows. I'm basically going with the same idea in mind.

logdahl

an hour ago

Thanks for working on this! All db clients I've used have felt very bloated and I relate to your experience of crashes. I will definitely try this out!

edstarch

2 hours ago

>it's a breeze to work with if you just get through them not updating the crate officially on crates.io but the community has found the solutions for it, you just have to dig deep for it

what does this mean?

the ui does look very nice

shayan_abbas

2 hours ago

Basically finding which distribution to go with, there is gpui-ce, gpui-pre because the zed team last updated their crate more than a year ago so people publish it by their own. I have found gpui kit to be the best since it adds a retained mode too I want to ultimately play around with

edstarch

2 hours ago

ok got it

just had a quick google too because gpui is on my “to check out some time” list and the situation honestly does not inspire confidence

it seems like everyone and their dog has their own vibe coded gpui flavor and the choice is between making your own vibe coded gpui flavor instead of your desired project vs building your project on quicksand

i feel like the problem is that (putting together a website, making a bunch of commits, getting people interested) was at some point a sign of a base level of commitment

now that the cost of that is zero it’s difficult to say whether a “community edition” actually has any community which will still be there next quarter

oh well sorry for the rant good on you for making it work clearly it is possible

mrgoldenbrown

an hour ago

What dbs does it support? I won't drop datagrip until I can access oracle, SQL server and postgres.

shayan_abbas

an hour ago

Supports SQL server and postgres natively, oracle through odbc. So yes, all of them

mikenikles

2 hours ago

> No feature is ever going behind a paywall.

How do you sustain continuous development of the project beyond the next two weekends?

shayan_abbas

2 hours ago

Voluntary sponsors is the plan for now, I've been fairly consistent with the development for the last few months so I'm fairly confident this won't be abandoned. However, I would love to create a community around it and get some consistent contributors.

written-beyond

3 hours ago

What about beekeeper studio?

shayan_abbas

3 hours ago

For the import connections feature? I can add that in, when I added the feature most people were coming from dbeaver and tableplus so just stuck to that.

dofm

2 hours ago

Oh this is good news — I have been looking for a fuss-free cross-platform alternative to MySQL Workbench to recommend for a data product for some time.

(Workbench is a pain but it was capable, off-the-shelf and was possible to document it once, more or less, for multiple platforms; I did not actually hate using it. But alas it is old now)

I will surely test this out; good luck with it.

shayan_abbas

2 hours ago

Thanks man!! Would love some feedback when you try it out

edem

2 hours ago

I'm sick and tired of this "rewrite everything in rust ai slop movement

logdahl

an hour ago

I hear you, although I must say I'm very interested in trying this out. It doesn't look like slop, and honestly all db clients I've used have somehow felt inredibly sloppy.

dofm

14 minutes ago

I agree.

For me, and for customers I want to document things for, it has come down to MySQL Workbench on the free/open source side of things.

I want to support multiple platforms without having to fundamentally document multiple strategies.

Most DB tools feel like they will go the way of PostgreSQL or Insomnia — get slowly burdened with cloud facilities and then a bait-and-switch means you need a login somewhere.

I would much rather be able to talk about clients that do fewer things, well, but DB clients do seem to be prime enshittification territory for some reason.