Hacker News Reader

Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

I love that this looks very much like Query Analyzer, the lightweight querying tool that came with SQL Server 2000. Back then, server management, querying and profiling were handled by separate utilities that did one thing well.

They were all replaced with SSMS, which was a slow abomination.

Query Analyzer is my favourite SQL editing environment to this day. It was incredibly snappy, could render thousands of rows without skipping a beat and had a nice explain visualisation built in. If there was a modern rewrite that supported PostgreSQL, I'd buy it in an instant.

There are screenshots in these articles if anyone's interested:

http://etutorials.org/SQL/microsoft+sql+server+2000/Part+II+...

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/using-query-analyz...

View on HN

I don’t think it has the explain visualization, but otherwise these screenshots look a lot like DBeaver to me. Perhaps worth a try if you haven’t stumbled upon it yet.

Dbeaver is many things, but I would not call it lightweight. It is written in Java, after all.

It is great, but Query Analyzer-alike it is not.

dBeaver is written in Java, but it feels very lightweight. I'm running it on a Linux desktop I've been using since 2014. It's also cross platform so I run it at work on a Windows laptop.

You think? Just looking at the interface and all the buttons/options screams ‘exhaustive/heavy’ to me.

It’s pretty fast for a Java tool, but I wouldn’t call it snappy.

Written correctly, Java can be both very fast and light. Eclipse IDE, written with Java consumes less resources than a comparable Atom/VSCode instance, with more features enabled.

Electron apps are not exactly lightweight either; it is about first time that someone uses them in an argument.

Query Analyzer was written with win32-api. No electron, no java, no c#, nothing (thought it might used MFC, not sure about that). It was snappier on Pentium 3 than Dbeaver is on M1 or Threadripper. Existence of slow molasses like Electron won't change that.

I didn't use DBEaver, but written some Java and using Eclipse for 20 years.

Java's UI libraries are extremely prone to wrong initialization. If you skew from the reference guide's implementation, Java's libraries try to mend the problems themselves, but this adds observable latency to the UI.

Of course, Java is never as fast as natively compiled language, but asymptotically approach to that speed and come pretty close. The funny thing is, some of the today's native applications are both heavier and less responsive w.r.t. their Java counterparts. This is because we tend to add loads of dependencies which aims to simplify development in said language, but that price is always paid at the end. Either once by the developer, or repeatedly by the user.

If you want an abomination, the Azure data studio makes SSMS look like query analyzer.

It's not feature complete, but Data Studio felt like a breath of fresh air compared to SSMS being all the slowness of Visual Studio coupled with about 1500 places where configuration might be.

(Of course, what do I know. I use DataGrip for my databasing these days. It's fine.)

My experience is that SSMS is slow to open. ADS is fast to open but otherwise slower and unreliable.

I still mostly use ADS for the git integration, file comparison, terminal, and file picker though.

SSMS only for those admin tasks where it has a nice GUI, or when ADS breaks in some way (happens a lot).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com