[HN Gopher] Show HN: Outerbase Studio - Open-Source Database GUI
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Show HN: Outerbase Studio - Open-Source Database GUI
We just launched Outerbase Studio, the open-source version of our
core database offering. It works in your browser or as a desktop
app and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. What it does: *
Connects to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite databases. * Spin up
local databases directly through the UI, even if you don't have one
running. * Manage and query your data in a lightweight, intuitive
interface. * Completely open source. Why we built it: We wanted to
share the core Outerbase experience with the developer community as
a free, open-source tool. It's simple, fast, and removes the
barriers to working with databases locally. GitHub:
https://github.com/outerbase/studio Release Blog:
https://www.outerbase.com/blog/outerbase-studio-open-source-...
Try it out: studio.outerbase.com Would love the HN communities
feedback, please try it out and let me know what you think!
Author : burcs
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-12-04 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| burcs wrote:
| Happy to answer any questions around this! As far as next steps
| we are going to be adding in more database support as well as
| bringing in some of Outerbase Cloud's AI features.
| drewp wrote:
| Are there comparisons to related projects somewhere?
|
| E.g. I've use DBeaver before. Is there some reason I should try
| Outerbase next time?
| johtso wrote:
| Don't think DBeaver supports libsql databases? I think the
| goal here is to be able to working with Turso / Cloudflare D1
| databases etc.
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah that's been another big part of this too, making sure
| it's a simple way to support these new and lightweight but
| powerful databases!
| burcs wrote:
| I put together this in related to our cloud offering, it's
| still somewhat relevant for Outerbase Studio even though some
| features are different:
|
| https://www.outerbase.com/blog/the-5-best-database-
| managemen...
|
| Our goal is to make data accessible through good user
| experiences and focus. Whether that is being able to spin up
| a local database directly from the app, or simply making the
| query experience as intuitive as possible, we are really
| pushing on making the database usable.
| vunderba wrote:
| That page mentions support for noSQL databases, but it
| looks like this open source version only supports SQL. Just
| want to call that out for clarification.
|
| Is the long term intent eventually to have parity between
| the open source desktop app and the cloud version (at least
| in terms of database type support)?
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Correct. Our goal is to have all of our data sources
| across all Outerbase products powered by our SDK -
| https://github.com/outerbase/sdk. Currently the Studio
| product is not powered by it but our cloud and other
| offerings are.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I downloaded it, fired it up locally, _was presented with a login
| screen_ , closed it, and uninstalled it. Sorry, but I don't log
| into local software.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I saw that it was AGPL licensed, which was odd to me for
| something that's supposed to be a client. I don't like the AGPL
| license because of how overbearing it is, I avoid downloading
| AGPL'd software, unless its a pure compiled binary. I am
| probably a little too strict about software licenses, but I
| rather always have the freedom to keep any forks to myself,
| don't force me to share code for my one-off project.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| AGPL still only requires you to share the code if you're
| sharing the fork in some form (binary or networked).
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| "or networked"
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Yes, it prevents the AWS case where you take a GPL
| product, put it behind an API gateway, and suddenly
| you're under no obligation to share your changes even
| though they're still sharing the product. This product in
| particular would excel as SaaS, and Outerbase already
| sells one of those -- they're not going to give you their
| product, white-label! You'd have to also share your mods,
| or link to the original.
|
| You can still do the above, and even charge for it!
| You're just in the "hosted software" business, not the
| embrace-extend-extinguish business.
| burcs wrote:
| Thank you for explaining this so clearly. We were very
| cautious in choosing the license for this exact reason!
|
| We love open-source and want to give back fully to the
| community. The AGPL felt like the most open license that
| still protects against outright theft -- something we've
| unfortunately experienced in the past.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| This is an incorrect interpretation of the AGPL. You do have
| the freedom to keep forks to yourself. You're only required
| to present source code to people who can use your program
| (directly or via the network).
| burcs wrote:
| Sorry I am assuming you downloaded our cloud based client,
| which yes is a bit different, here is the correct download link
| for our open-source client:
|
| https://github.com/outerbase/studio-desktop/releases
|
| Apologies for the confusion here!
| johtso wrote:
| Outerbase Studio is great! Been happily using it to experiment
| with queries over my Turso database, and see how many rows are
| being read when optimising.
|
| Excited to hear that some AI stuff is going to be brought over,
| currently do a lot of switching back and forth with ChatGPT, and
| having your database schema automatically be part of the prompt
| would be great.
|
| I'm guessing visualisation stuff is going to stay part of the
| paid offering?
| burcs wrote:
| Thank you Johtso! Glad you have been enjoying it :)
|
| Yeah definitely it's been a challenge to think about how we
| want to bring it over, probably going to do a bring your own
| key experience for the AI that way we're not eating the costs
| on an open-source project. Have been thinking about bundling a
| Llama type experience as well, but I'm not sure if people would
| want that, would you?
|
| Yeah for now it is, although we've talked about also releasing
| a lightweight version of that haha!
| kiwicopple wrote:
| congrats on open sourcing
|
| i didn't try it locally yet but it looks like the cloud version
| can create SQLite databases inside the browser? Assuming the open
| source version does too, can you also "connect" to those
| databases somehow?
| burcs wrote:
| Thank Paul -- Supabase has always been such a huge inspiration
| for us!
|
| Yes you can spin up sqlite directly in the browser, and on the
| local studio version you can actually spin up both MySQL and
| Postgres instances. You have to have docker running as well,
| and we will automatically spin up the containers for you,
| making it a completely hands-off experience!
|
| You can connect through them instantly through the GUI without
| needing to configure anything. We are actually going to be
| releasing something later this week that will really help with
| the local dev story by making those local databases accessible
| from the web
| thruflo wrote:
| Would be nice to add support for PGlite [0] to have the same
| "spin up in the browser" experience with Postgres.
|
| Let me know if we can help with it!
|
| [0] https://pglite.dev
| burcs wrote:
| That would be really cool, let's chat!
|
| Can you email me brandon [at] outerbase [dot] com?
| kiwicopple wrote:
| you can also find some code for "pglite in the browser"
| here: https://github.com/supabase-community/database-
| build
| burcs wrote:
| Awesome, I'll check it out!
| nandosobral03 wrote:
| The mac desktop icon looks huge compared to the standard macOS
| apps
| burcs wrote:
| Whoops I'll get that updated, for some reason it didn't crop
| the bounding box when I exported it!
| nandosobral03 wrote:
| Thank you! I've tried using outerbase within turso for my
| last few proyects and the experience has been great. Looking
| forward to using the app
| teddarific wrote:
| i hate working with DBs via command line, so this looks really
| cool. curious if your product resonates with a specific segment
| of developers, e.g. frontend vs backend? Hoping this can entirely
| replace me needing to do anything DB related in the comamnd
| line...
| burcs wrote:
| Yes! I too am not a huge command line fan (unless it's git for
| some reason), my background is actually in design so it was
| really painful trying to access DBs at first and the only
| options were the CLI or tools that look like they were built 20
| years ago.
|
| That was actually the catalyst for creating Outerbase! We have
| all types of people using us today, honestly we resonate really
| well with anyone who needs access to a DB. Frontend folks love
| us because we're a more modern way to do it and we line up
| really well with other modern frontend stacks, backend folks
| like us because we are really focused and make it
| straightforward to manage your data, and non-technical teams
| love us because they can actually get the data they need
| without needing to be a DBA.
| jaimehrubiks wrote:
| Does it will it support management of users and permissions? I
| always struggle with those on the cli
| invisal wrote:
| Adding user and permission support shouldn't be hard. What
| database are you using? We can put it on our next roadmap.
| jaimehrubiks wrote:
| I've used multiple but recently PostgreSQL is what we are
| using more. I think it's also the kind of task Platform or
| devops engineers, who are not usually experts in databases,
| are often asked to manage along with its deployment, so
| creating users and permissions is very common.
| Lord_Zero wrote:
| Support MSSQL please
| burcs wrote:
| So we support it in Outerbase Cloud, and we will get to work on
| adding support for it to Studio as well.
|
| In the meantime if you want you can check out our cloud-
| offering, we have a very generous free tier!
| srameshc wrote:
| This is neat. I love the support for both Postgresql and Sqlite
| and explicit support for Cloudflare D1.
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah - we love all of these new databases, we actually partner
| with Cloudflare, Turso, etc... to make sure we can provide the
| best experience possible.
| j1mmie wrote:
| For years I've wondered why a general purpose, high quality, good
| UX, browser based DB browser has not existed. I've implemented 3
| such (not general-purpose) browsers in my career. But I'd be
| really happy to _stop_ doing that and use this instead.
|
| I would love to see a Firestore driver implemented (maybe I'll
| take a crack at it some day), as I'm stuck in GCP land for the
| time being.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| PouchDB and CouchDB already exist
| burcs wrote:
| Thank you, I hope you can stop building those and use us
| instead as well :)
|
| I've never used Firestore directly, but I did see Firebase's
| recent announcement about Data Connect. It seems like it could
| act as a bridge to bring your data into Outerbase. Do you think
| that would work?
| vunderba wrote:
| Because it does exist, but it's not free. Jetbrains Datagrip
| has been around for a decade and has connectors for _most_
| database archetypes (mongo, sql, redis, duckdb, etc).
|
| Biggest limitation right now is its lack of support for vector
| style databases like Lance, qdrant, etc.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Browser based
| vunderba wrote:
| Missed that - I am a little unclear how being wrapped in
| electron as an app is necessarily an advantage - I guess it
| could be valuable if it were pulled out electron, and you
| could host it as a service.
| burcs wrote:
| Yeah you can definitely do that, I referenced how we do
| it in another comment. The electron app and running it
| locally allows you to use TCP protocol which isn't
| available directly in the browser.
|
| It's mostly just a nicely bundled way to run it if you
| aren't very technical but still want a easy to use
| database client.
|
| You can also run commands like this to connect to your
| database if you want:
|
| npx @outerbase/studio \ --port=5000 \ --user=admin
| --pass=123 \ mysql://root:123@localhost:3306/chinook
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| You can connect to your SQLite databases from the browser
| too without the Electron app if you wanted:
| https://studio.outerbase.com/connect
| leononame wrote:
| Still a valid counterargument. A good browser based DB GUI
| might just not exist because the existing desktop ones are
| so good already.
|
| I personally also vouch for DataGrip, a fantastic tool. No
| browser based tool is going to come close to the experience
| of an actual desktop app imo
| wiseowise wrote:
| > No browser based tool is going to come close to the
| experience of an actual desktop app imo
|
| Why?
| atombender wrote:
| Datagrip is fantastic. You can also get the same
| functionality if you buy the IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition,
| which includes many of the languages and tools that are also
| separately productized. I recommend this because the database
| tools integrate so well with the editor. For example, you can
| have a scratch file open that contains multiple SQL snippets.
| You can hit cmd-Enter when inside one snippet, and it will
| execute it and render the results either as a panel or inline
| inside the editor, notebook-style. Plus, full schema
| validation and autocompletion in the editor, and support for
| many, many databases including Postgres and ClickHouse.
|
| Not only that, but the SQL support works for embedded strings
| in programs written in other languages such as Go. So it
| knows that some statement conn.Exec("SELECT ...") is SQL and
| syntax-highlights it, performs schema validation and
| autocompletion _inside_ the string literal. Not only _that_ ,
| but you can open the string literal as a separate editor and
| edit it, including doing things like "reformat", which was an
| unexpected delight when I discovered it.
|
| It's this kind of "feature stacking", which features working
| organically with each other, that makes Jetbrains IDEs so
| damn good.
|
| But the basic database tools are also superb. Its table view
| is really fast. It has syntax highlighting (e.g. if a column
| value is JSON), live editing (including the ability to open a
| column value as an editor, in which case you get all the
| usual syntax tools), and even graph rendering with support
| for multiple data series and grouping in a single graph.
|
| There is also excellent support for exporting data. You can
| mark a bunch of result rows and copy them as CSV or as SQL
| INSERT statements, or you can save the entire result to a
| file. This is how I often export data from BigQuery, as it's
| much more convenient than Google's own tooling (the web UI is
| particularly bad, requiring that you export the query result
| to a GCS bucket first).
|
| These database UIs aren't technically difficult to do. But
| somehow nobody else seems capable. The closest I can think of
| is Microsoft's tooling around SQL Server, which is pretty
| slick, albeit MSSQL-specific. I often wonder how Jetbrains,
| which is a pretty small company, can be so effective and
| produce such an incredibly feature-rich product portfolio.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I remember I used TablePlus, which was what you described. Very
| pleasant program. Not browser based, though.
| slaucon wrote:
| Yeah, my last company paid for a subscription to this.
| Enjoyed using it. Don't think there's a massive market, but
| definitely lots of devs who want easy DB access and would pay
| $5/month.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I think it's because there's no business model in the pure "DB
| browser" product. People don't seem willing to pay enough for
| it to build a good business around it.
|
| Everyone I've seen either pivots to a Retool competitor or a BI
| tool.
|
| Source: I've tried it twice.
| sirjaz wrote:
| Any plans to use tauri? That way you can use the native os web
| view, plus cut the overhead of electron
| burcs wrote:
| Great point, I am a big fan of how lightweight Tauri is. We
| have used it in the past but have got hung up on some of the
| browser APIs not being supported.
|
| I'll have to look into it again, it could have just been a
| skill issue.
| brayden_wilmoth wrote:
| Tauri when we last tried it was using your default browser to
| power it, which is great in theory. When we went to use newer
| API's such as the Popover API then browsers like Safari had a
| subpar user experience for a number of reasons of its own.
|
| As much as the performance and lightweight aspects of Tauri
| are great we also have to weight the consistency of user
| experience which Electron gives having Chromium built into
| it. All that said... it's worth us taking a second look to
| see if Tauri will work for us in this use case!
| shreddit wrote:
| Can i put it inside a docker container alongside my pg container
| and serve it under a path like "/dbadmin" with password
| protection? That's my current workflow with pgadmin.
| burcs wrote:
| Definitely! We actually embed studio as part of another one of
| our offerings. It's actually iframed in, but you could achieve
| similar results if you wanted to dockerize it.
|
| https://github.com/Brayden/starbasedb/blob/main/src/studio/i...
| delduca wrote:
| I would use it if it weren't based on Electron. In recent months,
| I've replaced all Electron apps with native versions, and not
| only are they more performant, but my RAM is now saved for more
| important tasks.
| distrill wrote:
| it runs in the browser
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