[HN Gopher] Show HN: Time Travel with Your SQL
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Show HN: Time Travel with Your SQL
Hi, my name is Anguel and I am one of the developers of WhoDB
(https://github.com/clidey/whodb) I am not a fan of the dbeaver,
beekeeper, adminer, etc experience because they are bloated, ugly,
and at best okay but not great. Hence why I started working on
WhoDB. The approach: - browser-based (chrome/firefox) - no bloat
- jupyter notebook-like experience (Scratchpad) - built-in AI co-
pilot with ollama (local) or openai/anthropic We just shipped
query history and replay (time travel?) to the Scratchpad. Would
love for you to check it out and give some feedback aka roast us
into oblivion: docker run -p 8080:8080 clidey/whodb Food for
thought: 1. What's your biggest database pain point? 2. Any
killer feature missing from current tools?
Author : modelorona
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-04-10 22:48 UTC (1 days ago)
| neximo64 wrote:
| 1. The tools are always web based and have a bloated and bad
| experience as opposed to a complete native app.
|
| 2. Charts, easy ability to find the database if there are so many
| Rucadi wrote:
| I don't see much difference between a native app and web app,
| in the end is what the developer decided to do with that.
|
| See autocad for web for example, is kinda the same. Or
| Photopea, photoshop's clone.
| xnx wrote:
| > I am not a fan of the dbeaver, beekeeper, adminer, etc
| experience because they are bloated, ugly, and at best okay but
| not great
|
| What you call "bloated", I call "features". What you call "ugly",
| I call "functional".
| jf22 wrote:
| I've never made a software usage decision because a product
| felt "too bloated" for us to use.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Cool product.
|
| > No more wasting time crafting complex SQL queries
|
| I always wondered about this sentiment; isn't the time spent
| crafting complex queries a good thing when trying to understand a
| problem domain? I.e. incrementally refining your mental model of
| the data model
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Some complexity is accidental (how do I do this gnarly window
| function and get the 3rd highest value from the previous week
| this time last year except on the first week of the quarter),
| and some is essential (why is the data like this?).
|
| People confuse the two, and rightfully dislike the former while
| dangerously resenting the latter.
| rprtr258 wrote:
| how did you manage to put
|
| - no bloat
|
| - built-in AI co-pilot with ollama (local) or openai/anthropic
|
| into one list?
| Natfan wrote:
| Pretty easily, as it happens[0]. Just implement the RESTful
| methods as appropriate. Ollama supports the OpenAI API spec
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/clidey/whodb/blob/main/core/src/llm/llm_c...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/openai/openai-openapi
| listenallyall wrote:
| > query history and replay
|
| For clarification- am I correct that what you are referring to as
| "time travel" is simply a history list of prior queries you've
| run? Can I today, run a query and see what the results would have
| been in the database last month (or yesterday, or 2 hours ago,
| etc)?
| tarasyarema wrote:
| I also understood that, but seems unreasonable to be able to
| achieve it without somehow storing the state via scd or some
| sort of audit + multi engine support
| jedberg wrote:
| When talking about Time Travel in regards to a database, that
| term usually means "seeing what the data looked like at a
| specific time". From my brief skim here, I don't see that.
|
| Is that concept built in somewhere?
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| "Conversate With Your Data: No more wasting time crafting complex
| SQL queries - ask away!"
|
| Maybe it is just me but literally every single product that has
| tried to eliminate SQL somehow with a conversational interface
| has never seen mass success, if they did, we wouldn't be using
| SQL anymore
| djfobbz wrote:
| Nice product! I'm also not a big fan of DBeaver, Beekeeper, or
| Adminer. However, I do use HeidiSQL, and it's been lightweight
| and robust for me over the last 20 years. One feature I really
| appreciate is the query history, which is categorized by date.
| Have you ever given it a try?
| getgalaxy wrote:
| getgalaxy.io ;)
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Unsolicited feedback (or I guess solicited reading the post
| again): Juypter Notebook experience got me to click because I
| thought this might be like a Deepnote alternative
|
| But the only screenshot on the Github page was decidedly not
| that. It wasn't showing something very appealing visually, or
| immediately obvious in terms of necessity for a tool calling its
| competitors ugly and bloated
|
| I don't use any of the ones you listed so maybe they're even
| uglier, but I would maybe tweak the pitch and make it clearer who
| this is for
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