TablePlus – Native GUI tool for relational databases (2018) | Hacker News Reader

TablePlus – Native GUI tool for relational databases (2018)

tableplus.io

168 pointskgraves83 comments

This piece of software is superb. It's lightning fast, the UI is so easy to use, in terms of productivity it's super nice (small things like "copy as an insert statement").

It has been my daily driver for months now, but only for personal projects. I tried to get a license at work, but our lawyer said their EULA is a no-go :(

Can you elaborate on what it was about the EULA that was a problem?

IANAL but I really don’t see anything problematic here, it’s all standard boilerplate digitally distributed software stuff. Maybe he thought the ownership clause was a little too broad?

https://tableplus.io/blog/2018/01/license-agreement.html

> neither TablePlus nor any TablePlus’s provider makes any representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied: ... that the Application, its servers, the content, or e-mails sent from or on behalf of TablePlus are free of viruses, scripts, trojan horses, worms, malware, timebombs or other harmful components.

Is that really standard boilerplate? I don't recall seeing a clause like that before.

I mean, again I'm not a lawyer and I don't spend time reading EULAs, but to me that seems like a pretty uninteresting hold-harmless agreement that happens to specify the harms from getting hacked and distributing malware, like what happened to Transmission and Piriform.

My wife is an attorney and if there is ONE thing she wishes she could make everyone understand it's that there is no such thing as a "standard" or "boilerplate" legal document.

Well, that's also hardly in her best interests now is it? Not really a partial judge (hah).

Ofcourse there is; multiple times have I gotten documents via-via that were identical to docs I received before and the lawyers billed hours for that copy/paste work making it sound, like your wife, that it is custom and a lot of work. It can be Ofcourse, but most, even complex company documents I have signed (and that's 100s) are indeed boilerplate and the lawyers are scammers trying to bill hours for 'writing' them. If they would say '$1000 - boilerplate document (c) OurFirm' that would be fine, but making out it took days to make while it is exactly boilerplate/template with changed names is what all lawyers (at least the Corp ones we deal with) do (and they also spend > 1 week delivering these templates because 'so much work') but it is a scam imho. Akin to me selling a software application and charging all buyers 1000 hours and deliver it after 2 months instead of a license and an immediate download.

Obviously ymmv and I might have just encountered crappy ones, but 100s of signed legal docs in my career from at least 30 different lawyers show me that actually 95% is boilerplate of the docs we get.

But you're just proving my point: if 95% is boilerplate, 5% is not. Plus you have to consider the circumstances. The same exact document might have vastly different ramifications depending on what else is involved - the work, product, other parties, etc.

I'm very happy for folks who haven't run into issues by not using a lawyer. But having had documents reviewed and realizing that things are pretty much never what they appear on the surface to a layman, I would never consider signing a legal document without having it reviewed by a lawyer. Nor would I assume some "boilerplate" document is going to cover what I, as a non-lawyer, assume it will.

I did not mean that of the documents 5% of every document was custom: I mean that of the say 100 docs I signed, 5 were not just standard out of the drawer with only the parties changed.

Disclaimer here is that I am not from the US and as I understand legal things are different there: many things were you get sued over in the Netherlands where the contracts could be an issue in the US, are basically laughed out of court here in NL. Anecdotal; someone tried to sue us for damages because there was a misspelling in a contract with him. The judge told him literally to not waste his time as the intention was clear. Also indirect damages are not taken very seriously here (and should be nowhere imho, but I hear they are in the US).

So I only made my comment based on my experience in NL, DE, HK, ES and UK and there I mostly saw copy/paste work while still being billed hours for that non-effort.

Ah, very good point. It would certainly be great if things were that straight forward in the US.

> TablePlus may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any or no reason, suspend or terminate this Agreement with or without prior notice.

> Without limiting the foregoing, neither TablePlus nor any TablePlus’s provider makes any representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied: (i) as to the operation or availability of the Application, or the information, content, and materials or products included thereon; (ii) that the Application will be uninterrupted or error-free; (iii) as to the accuracy, reliability, or currency of any information or content provided through the Application; or (iv) that the Application, its servers, the content, or e-mails sent from or on behalf of TablePlus are free of viruses, scripts, trojan horses, worms, malware, timebombs or other harmful components.

Especially the last point in the second excerpt was the issue.

That is a little concerning. They are explicitly refusing to say the software is not a trojan.

It would make me think twice about using it.

I'd say it's a protection in case of their servers being breached and you downloading a malicious version of the application.

No court on earth would support them if it attempted to exfiltrate all of your data.

AKA the CCleaner clause. Did Piriform get sued over that incident?

Although as TablePlus worded it, it comes across like they want to be able to intentionally add malware to their software and get away with it. I'm no lawyer so I'm not sure how feasible it would be to add a "due to circumstances outside our control" subclause of some kind.

> Did Piriform get sued over that incident?

They're still installing software with CCleaner without user consent see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCleaner#Installing_bundled_so...

Wow. Is that common? It seems a little unusual to explicitly call these things out. But I can't say a typically read a lot of EULAs, either, so I don't know.

I'm shocked your lawyers had an issue with a company stating they don't want to be held liable if they're somehow hacked and start sending out malware.

Seems pretty standard to me.

So Equifax shouldn't be held liable for the leak of personal data?

Are we going to sit around here and pretend they were?

>It's lightning fast

I think this depends on the database rather than the software itself.

I've just compared TablePlus to PGAdmin (the new web one), on a fast query which returns 1000 rows. The responsiveness of TP is really noticable

yep, compared to SQL management studio as well the difference is night and day.

I'm not talking about database queries, I'm talking about working within the UI. If you compare it to Navicat or any of the Java-based apps, TablePlus is really quite fast.

I disagree.

Toad for example is really slow, but a lot of that is the design of the software itself (e.g. autocompleting the same thing twice is still slow the second time, because they don't do basic cache or predictive lookups).

Replaced Postico with TablePlus, mainly because needed to access MySQL databases too, and Redis support doesn't hurt. Good UI, frequent updates and the free version isn't too limiting.

I've used it on MacOS and it was great, really nice interface. Too bad there isn't a Linux option.

> Modern, native, and friendly GUI tool

Need to add Mac-only to that list.

There’s a Windows version.

Echoing what others are saying. This is a great tool and one few new tools to enter my daily workflow in years. For a long time, I saw very little improvement in development tools, but this and Paw, an API client, have given me faith in beautiful, native Mac developer tools.

Ever since hearing about TablePlus (here), I've been using it for side projects. I tried to introduce it at work but the lack of Oracle support in the windows client was an issue.

Yeah a tool like this is going to be situational for everyone.

Fast, nice looking, cross plattform. Pick any 2.

So one which one does this fail in your opinion?

It's on 1.5 platforms (Win version is limited and not fully released).

Sighs, I've been trying to skip paying the apple tax for years but still like this still keeps in looped in.

It’s not free.

See what I did there?

Counter: Sublime Text and Sublime Merge.

Though I will concede they put an extraordinary amount of work into hitting all three.

Did not know about merge, will def check that out, thx!

What about chrome, firefox, vlc, qbittorrent, gvim, abiword, maya, sublime, sumatra pdf, obs ...

Browsers: basically no UI, except for the browser engine. Obviously has reason to use a full browser engine (unlike a small electron app).

VLC etc: looks terrible.

Sublime: looks surprisingly good. Took a ton of effort though. Perhaps a more appropriate list is

Fast, good looking, cross plattform, reasonable effort: pick any 3.

> VLC etc: looks terrible.

I've never heard anyone say that VLC or qbittorrent or obs look terrible. Seems like a way to shift the goal posts and have some sort of ephemeral impossible standard of 'looking good'. There are plenty of GUI frameworks that are very fast and perfectly simple to use.

It’s obviously subjective. My bar for “not terrible” is basically native look or some cross platform web look that skips the widgets (better for design and consistency, worse for productivity and usability).

The horrible ones are the custom rendered not-quite-native ones that look like 90’s apps (basically nearly all Gtk, Swing apps and similar). It’s not that they can’t be nicely laid out, productive or snappy they just look horrible in terms of design and polish.

I’ve used it for a few months. It has a nice feel to it, and a few things Postico doesn’t have, such as exporting to JSON. The author is also quite responsive on GitHub and has even added a few small features I requested. Overall I find Postico to be a bit more suited to my needs, but nice to see another polished app in this space.

Can it generate ER Diagrams like DBeaver?

https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver/wiki/ER-Diagrams

i think no feature like this currently

Previous “Show HN” from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339004

In many ways I like TablePlus, but at least on MySQL, I'm not fond that it single-quotes all data types in the "Copy Rows As > SQL Import Statement", including decimals and integers. I don't want to introduce potential data type casting errors into my export. Sequel Pro, while less advanced in other ways, doesn't do this; it properly only quotes the data types that should be quoted.

My biggest Problem with nearly every SQL client: Expandable Tree UI Components are the bane of usability. They're slow, error prone, and a million other reasons.

SequelPro is a bastion in this regard and has a simple table listing on the left side. Unfortunately, there's only one author on the project and he's pretty busy with his day job.

The screenshots of TablePlus looks tree free. I'll definitely be downloading!

I use this on a daily basis for Postgres and some really basic Redis work. Recommended.

I own TP and I like it overall. I just can't stop using Sequel Pro, it's just so damn snappy and easy to use. I need to give TP another try but it was really hard to break my habit of using Sequel Pro.

SequelPro for Mac and HeidiSQL for Windows. Those two are really light weight and easy to use.

But for me the best id DataGrip. It's not light, but cross platform and get works done.

I pay for IDEA so I could be using DataGrip (or close enough? I wish JetBrains was clearer on this). Do you it from within another IntelliJ IDE or standalone?

This is beautiful software designed and implemented right. If you do use this then don't look back at other similar tools or you'll be sorely depressed to use them.

No, I don't work for this company!

Here’s a free native GUI for Oracle: http://www.pebblereports.com/sqlpal/

How does it compare to Sequel Pro (https://www.sequelpro.com/) that would make me want to pay?

> Modern, native, and friendly GUI tool for relational databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite & more

For one, it's not just MySQL.

Ok basically a valid point but I think you can also access MariaDB, Postgres and others that support the common SQL standards with Sequel and it's open source.

I've used both for some time. TablePlus has a beautiful UI and looks better than Sequel Pro for sure, but I find Sequel Pro to be more capable and easier to use. Redis support of TablePlus isn't too great either (searching on keys doesn't work), so I need to use another tool for Redis management anyway.

What tool are you using for Redis Management? Is there one that you'd recommend?

Hi, I just added Redis advanced filter. Thanks for the feedback!

I find it generally nicer than Sequel Pro (better UI, quicker database switching). Exporting and importing are much better in Sequel Pro. I do those in SP and then switch back to TP for editing. It's also got a dark mode which looks quite good.

Sequel Pro has dark mode already in the newest nightly build. Sometimes I got import failed which Sequel Pro working well.

Can somebody elaborate on what GUI framework this project is using? On windows, the text sometimes is so blurry that it reminds me of WPF(?)

It is WPF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18004842

Really nice software, switched from Postico several months ago, no regrets. The UI is perfect, it's fast.

I use SequelPro for Mac (and love it!). Has anyone used both and can explain whether it is worth switching?

It's worth switching. Autocomplete/autosuggest is faster, when conneting to a server they infer which credential is wrong.

I guess the catch is the software isn't free -- you have to pay or access it through a paid bundle like SetApp. If you query a DB everyday though the price it's worth it. If you only need a a few queries now and again then maybe SequelPro is the better option.

Actually Table Plus is free to use with some limitations. You should check it out!

This looks great! Bummer it has a per-seat license, instead of per-developer, though.

Is anyone aware of software like this, but web based (saas)?

phpMyAdmin?

It is nice for free and in a few deployment scenarios. I do feel like it encourages bad practices however (e.g. not using a VPN to manage databases, but rather relying on web authentication).

Thanks, but isn't that only mysql mostly? TablePlus supports a very wide range of databases, I'm looking for a single database manager in the cloud for multiple different db types (postgres, mysql, mongo, etc).

I use adminer for years.

I recommend adminer

https://www.adminer.org/

Also very easy to deploy via docker if you have a need.

Used this once but it was terrible at the time.

awwww, no tux.

It looks nice but what I really miss is a metabase like app with a few edit options. Anything out there? This would replace so many internal crud apps

For desktops Libreoffice Base is nice.

See here for more: https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-access/

For web hosting, I would push PHP. Each page is it's own end point!

I don’t mind it being a desktop app but I don’t want users specifying database connection info and having a raw database view. Metabase has admins setup the database connection and then users go through the regular email/password access. You can create all sorts of custom data views (not sql views).. hah, this sounds like an ad. So, a simple email/password protected login possibly with 2fa and then allowing operators to edit results of predefined custom views is what I’m missing. Typically this is reimplemented everywhere

what do you mean with 'edit options'?

We have a tool similar to metabase - this is seektable.com - which also can be used for as 'database viewer' where end-user can define custom HTML formatting for each value in the table; there are no values editing yet so it is interesting to hear maybe we can add something to make this possible.

TablePlus' authors should read "How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters)"

https://uxdesign.cc/how-white-space-killed-an-enterprise-app...

Data density is particularly important for this type of application's success. My post wasn't meant to be pejorative; rather, they should read the article with the goal of improving the "data density" of their tables, and other areas.

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