After I wrote last year about 3 Database Viewers for SQLite, one of the maintainers of Beekeeper Studio pointed me to their database manager. I was interested, but unfortunately there where too many bugs that made it impossible to work with my demo database. I liked what I saw, but it needed more time to get useful.
Big improvements
Since then, a lot of work went into Beekeeper Studio and the problems got fixed. Today, Beekeeper Studio works well and lets you access various database systems (supporting SQLite, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres and a few more) and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac.
You can get the community edition for free or support the project with the ultimate edition for 99$.
You find everything you need to start in the documentation. Take a look at the screenshots and you will get a good understanding of the look and feel of this application.
Works with SQLite…
You can connect to SQLite and do all the things you would do with DB Browser for SQLite or SQLiteStudio. You find your tables under the section Entities and from there you can explore the structure of a table:
Or you can see the data in a specific table without the need to run SQL:
If you create a new table, you get a wizard like guidance to create the table and the rows:
And if you need to test your SQL query, you can do that:
… and SQL Server
If you connect to SQL Server, Beekeeper Studio organises the schemas as folders, which significantly eases the search for the right table:
You can now use NTLM to connect with your domain user to the database. For that you need to enter the username and password of your domain user, enter the domain name and trust the server certificate. It is more work than the SQL Server Management Studio with its magic of the . connection string, but it is doable and much less work that to connect to every database on your developer machine with an application-specific user.
How much database manager is in Beekeeper Studio?
The answer depends on what database system you use. If you use SQLite, you can use Beekeeper Studio for all the administrative tasks.
For SQL Server you get a similar experience as with DataGrip. Creating tables, adding columns and DDL in general works well. However, for things like backups, reports or SSIS you still need SQL Server Management Studio. Those aspects are not part of Beekeeper Studio.
What I missed
The beta feature to export data to CSV or JSON did not work with schemas other than the default schema in SQL Server. I hope this will be fixed soon, then this would be a very useful feature.
The most missed feature for me is an error dialog. At the moment you can find all errors in the developer tools. I don’t like that approach and would much more prefer a pop-up dialog that tells me what went wrong. As it is, most users will not notice the error and think their task worked until they figure out that this was not the case.
An entity-relationship diagram for the whole database would be a nice addition. While I need such a feature only at special occasions, it would allow me to fully replace DataGrip.
If something goes wrong
Should you run into a bug or a problem, do not hesitate and create an issue on GitHub. In the past the critical problems got fixed fast and where no longer an issue in the next release. Therefore, make sure that you update Beekeeper Studio frequently.
Conclusion
Beekeeper Studio is now in a state that most developer can use it without a problem. As soon as the beta features like the export work with all table combinations, you get a very useful database manager that covers all daily database tasks of a developer.