DB Browser for SQLite (Windows, macOS, and Most Versions of Linux) | Hacker News Reader

DB Browser for SQLite (Windows, macOS, and Most Versions of Linux)

sqlitebrowser.org

411 pointspunnerud68 comments

Hello Hacker News! I'm one of the maintainers of this project.

Thank you for featuring our project here, and we will be releasing a new stable version soon, so stay tuned for the new version! If you have any further comments, suggestions, or questions about the project, please feel free to leave an issue in our repository! Thank you.

Thank you for your contribution. This is a great piece of FOSS!

Will support for STRICT be in this release?

Yep, it's been in the development code base since 2021, and is in our Release Candidate builds for the next upcoming release:

https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/releases/tag/...

Just discovered this piece of software on my own about two months ago.

Thank you for making - and giving away - such a valuable tool. I am a huge fan and very grateful to you and your team.

I appreciate this software, thanks!

Thank you for this great piece of software. I had to process some data and it was either trying to do it with a spreadsheet, which was slow and awful, while this was simple and snappy.

Plus I get to use the SQL syntax which is great :D

I've used this for debugging on pretty much every single SQLite project I've ever done. An excellent piece of software!

The killer feature for me with this app is the stupidly easy CSV loading. I deal with huge CSVs at work often. SQLite Browser is the easiest, fastest and most lightweight UI tool to analyze them I've tried. It can load millions of records into a table in like <3 seconds. Then obviously you can query the CSV data via SQL.

I tried the non-installer exe version (32 &64bits) because that csv loading sounded very interesting, but cant make it work without installation because sqlite3.dll, qt5network.dll, qt5xml.dll nor qt5printsupport.dll can't be found.

I don't see the point of providing a standalone exe version that does not work?

Well, back to excel for csv :/

> I don't see the point of providing a standalone exe version that does not work?

Which download did you use?

For windows there's really only an .msi which installs everything, and a .zip which needs to be unzipped and have the executable file run from inside the uncompressed directory.

The files it's complaining about missing should next to the .exe inside the unpacked directory. If you move the .exe elsewhere, or just extract it by itself, it's not going to work.

All of those DLLs are included in the same zip file as the portable exe. Sounds like you may be trying to run it without extracting first.

I can see them but somehow it does not find it being next to it.

Don't know if it is a windows policy I am not aware.

How are you unzipping the .zip before running the .exe?

It sort of sounds like you're double clicking on the zip? I'm not personally sure if that unzips the whole folder in the right way or not.

If that's what you're doing, maybe right click on the .zip and extract everything using that first?

Note that I don't personally use windows much any more, so my windows knowledge is getting rusty for some stuff. ;)

You might want to give VisiData a look: https://visidata.org

It's a TUI program, so if you want a full-featured GUI, it might not be up your alley, but it's the best tool I've ever used for doing ad-hoc work with large CSVs.

One of the senior devs (Martin) spent a loooot of time optimising the CSV import process. Many different approaches using sample data sets (from rough memory) of between 800MB and a few GB I think.

I think this feature should be included in more structured database tools. Being able to load a CSV and query against it, either to an in-memory sqlite or a temp directory (depending on size) is a great option for this kind of work.

I've noticed throughout the years SQLite has lots of handy features built in for dealing with CSV and other input and output formats. Sometimes it's easier to get data into it and use SQL to slice and dice that data than it is to pipe a bunch of unix shell commands together that really only understand unstructured text. Discoverability and subsequently trying to remember all shell incantations is a bit of an issue though, so many people don't see SQLite as the Swiss army knife it can be.

Thanks for letting me know about this! I do the same thing... DuckDB loads CSVs very quick and easy. Malloy uses duckDB and can work in VScode or vscode.dev or the vscode built into github. So, you can analyze large .csv files in any of those places.

For example, go here [1]. Press "." (this loads vscode in browser) and you will be analyzing large .csv or .parquet files directly in your browser, after you click on the .malloynb file

Something I made to analyze every form submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (10-K etc.) since 2014. [2] Go there, press ".", install the malloy extension, and click on the .malloynb file! Do it all within your browser, or download it and use it in VScode.

[1] https://github.dev/malloydata/quickstart/blob/main/README [2] https://github.dev/mrtimo/isa5

How do you feel about Malloy vs PRQL?

I think I would miss the the semantic data modeling of malloy, and Malloy is definitely easier to read and write IMHO, in part because of the semantic data modeling.

I would also miss the nest feature of Malloy, and the way it handles time / dates / timestamps.

I seriously love this app. I use it nearly every day. I scoured the net looking for a FOSS sqlite Mac app with a table exploring GUI. This is the best one!

If you are looking for another one: I use https://sqlitestudio.pl which is GPL-3 only and also cross platform. I'm not sure I ever compared them, I think I just came across sqlitestudio first and it stuck.

I've used both DB Browser and SQLiteStudio, and I prefer the flow and interface of SQLiteStudio.

It's been a few years since I've used DB Browser, so I forget exactly what I didn't like about it. Maybe I should download it again and try it out one more time and see if I still feel the same way.

this is weird

> Portable - No need to install or uninstall. Just download, decompress and run.

and I download the dmg and it's an unverified installer inside. Pass.

Most OSS software is not signed, as Apple, MS, etc require you to pay to sign. I know there are some non-profits that will sign OSS stuff for Windows, but I don't know of any that do that for Apple devices.

I run on MacOS, I have no idea how I installed it, but I haven't had any trouble.

Another similar open source app is DBeaver: https://dbeaver.io/

Works with more than just SQLite.

Nice because it has eclipse market capability with which you can install vrapper and other handy plugins.

including duckdb as well.

I’d need to use DBeaver Pro for the work I do - but they don’t offer perpetual licensing - which is a deal-killer for me (EDIT: I originally incorrectly claimed they didn’t support offline-installs, but apparently they do - but only for installs with a 12-month built-in timebomb: https://dbeaver.com/license-types/ )

It says “No monthly subscription” which really just means “Annual subscription” instead: https://dbeaver.com/edition/

It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth $500/yr - I’d actually be happy to pay $1000 or more - but I absolutely need a pain+hassle-free UX that I can drag around air-gapped networks - and install on a legacy Windows 2003 VM running an ancient build of Sybase and then forget about it for 3-5 years, but be able to RDP-in and know that my DB tooling is still going to be there, unchanged, reliable and dependable.

…whereas subscription desktop software with deeply integrated online accounts and activation and mandatory updates every few weeks (and the occasional account system outage, which ruins everything (looking at you, GitKraken) really really does not work well in those kinds (…my kinds) of environment.

——-

SaaS as a business-model for online services is fine; great, even; and I’m not even opposed to it for desktop software provided that it delivers more value and overall UX quality compared to how-we-did-things-before - but SaaS companies don’t have a solution to the problem of ultra-long-life’d, ultra-dependable, server/system administration tooling.

Can you imagine if Bash or Zsh - or phpMyAdmin - or systemd had to phone-home for a new OAuth access-token every month?

What feature do you need that isn't in the open source version?

Why not fork it and implement that feature, and then use that?

If you don't want to deal with a company trying to extract profit from you, use the open source version. That's the way to ensure your own freedom.

> What feature do you need that isn't in the open source version?

ODBC support, Cassandra, Redis, and Azure (Table) Storage support, and support for the kinds of obsolete RDBMS and "4GL" you see in large enterprise and small mom-and-pop backrooms (Progress, Clipper, AdvantageDB, ElevateDB, etc). And SQL script debugging for Postgres.

Currently I have separate tools/clients/IDEs for all the different data systems I target (e.g. SSMS, MySQL Workbench, Azure Storage Explorer, Azure Data Studio, Excel PowerQuery, LinqPad for .NET Framework 4.x for both x86 and x64 because ODBC and OLE-DB are like that); while I have a modest set of portable-ish VM images of obsolete Windows OS instances where I can run MS Access 2003 or some Clipper derivative. I'm also still running Firebird and even FoxPro 9 in another VM somewhere.

...so yes, having a single tool which handles 85% of my tasks without needing to juggle VMs and multiple bloated Electron apps together would be an improvement for me and worth me paying money for.

> Why not fork it and implement that feature, and then use that?

"Fork it" is not a reasonable suggestion considering the amount of work involved (see above).

> If you don't want to deal with a company trying to extract profit from you, use the open source version. That's the way to ensure your own freedom

As I said, I'm perfectly fine with me throwing money at DBeaver. I'm just expressing my frustration with DBeaver that I think they're being callous by not offering perpetual offline licenses for Dbeaver Pro, for any amount of money. The fact they used to[1] but don't anymore suggests they were getting disappointing return business from deep-pocketed "enterprise" customers, but I'm disappointed that their solution to this problem of theirs means leaving my money on the table because now they don't have any product licenses that I can work with.

[1] According to https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/Differences-between-license... - they stopped doing perpetual licenses after v23.3).

Your reasons are valid and make complete sense to me. I wonder if you could write to them and explain your use case and offer to pay for a perpetual license? No idea if it'll work, but worth a shot maybe?

If you try this, do update and let us know what they say.

Toad by Quest Software was the original SQL GUI development tool, and developed the basic style that most of these apps use today. I have senior developers who refuse to consider anything else, and cling to unsupported versions of Toad.

Oracle SQL Developer does not support SQLite, but the design is their "internal Toad-killer," and reimplements Toad in Java. It does accept JDBC drivers for 3rd-party databases (but not SQLite so far).

Great software. I use it almost every day. But, posted many times before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sqlitebrowser.org

I’ve been here since 2008, and only saw/needed this today.

I’m one of today’s 10000 :) https://xkcd.com/1053/

Been using this software for a decade and it’s hands down the best SQLite browser and DB editor that I have seen.

For the CLI there's litecli. It has auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

https://github.com/dbcli/litecli

Nice. I use pgcli for postgres and wanted something similar for sqlite.

same core devs.

This is my go-to while I've been working on a SQLite-based app to see what's actually in the database.

There used to be a Firefox plugin with much similar features. However since the change of Firefox plugin arch, it's no longer available.

I remember using this back in the day, cool stuff!

There is one for the weird lz4json format they use now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozlz4-edit/

But it is super unwieldy. Pretty much the only way to decode those files without compiling the decoder from source since it has non-standard lz4 headers.

For the few remaining SQLite files DB Browser works great.

I'm teaching people dev with sqlite, and DB Browser is a few tools I recommend them to download (alone with VSCode and Meld)

This application single-handedly underpins the entire competitive/online yugioh space. Thank you for your excellent work!

Interesting. Are there (SQLite?) extensions or other bits commonly used with the application for Yugioh?

Asking because we're getting very near the next major release, but if there are extensions or similar (OSS) things people commonly use with our application, then we could look at adding them to in the next release. Or maybe the point release after that (depending on time/effort/etc).

Note that I'm not at all familiar with Yugioh personally, but looking at the wikipedia page... wow that's an extensive extended Community. ;)

Great project, came in super handy on a project and I needed a way to mass import csv files which wasn't a feature at the time (7 years ago), threw together a PR over a weekend and the kind maintainers helped get it in. The chief maintainer at the time Justin is a cool guy, donate if you can.

Thanks heaps. Yep the donations definitely help pay for useful stuff for us maintainers (and domain name, etc).

I have this app open right now, actually. It's honestly... okay. I wish I had something better installed. It gets the job done, but the UI leaves something to be desired. It's free though, so I can't complain. I use it to manage my local financial transaction database.

DataGrip is less free and has a pretty good UI.

I primarily use DBeaver, it is meh...

I don't know why, but this program had difficulty opening what was clearly a correct SQLite3 database file (created with TypeORM) on Ubuntu 22.04. "Reason: Invalid file format". I ended up using Beekeeper Studio instead, which didn't have any problems with that file. I wonder if that bug is fixed.

Wonder if it was something to do with STRICT mode support not being present in the 3.12.2 release (what you probably tried)?

Our new 3.13.0 release (should be out tomorrow) supports STRICT, as have our dev builds for a few years.

That's the only situation that springs to mind for it having issues like that. Though it's also possible there was some other unknown bug at the time lurking around.

I am a huge fan of this app that is the Toad like equivalent for Sqlite for me. Keep up this excellent work!

Use this a lot, doesn't seem to get many releases but it looks like there's one coming soon.

Very useful app in my day job as a Windows dev, it works flawlessly and is quite reliable.

I guess devs haven't ventured down the rabbithole of public DBs? Not trying to be a jerk, just honestly surprised this is on the front page.

Surprised and not surprised. There's a lot of devs that know a little SQL, but I think it's different when you're mostly using ORMs to abstract away the DB. For business users, you pull up a GUI like this or the one that comes with the DB and sometimes spend hours writing queries and exploring the schema, so you get used to these kinds of tools... especially if you have to move between several databases. I'm sure plenty of devs, do as well, but probably a smaller proportion. It's a great project though.

I posted it (and did a couple of years ago).

I use Datagrip as my primary tool when connecting to DB, but DB Browser is still used several times each month because the simple CSV import, adding index and view data.

I even copy-paste DB Browser in Application folder on Mac, to be able to run 2-3 instances at the same time.

Awesome, other than the vscode sqlite browser I can actually view dbs using sqlite-vss!

Oddly the release version doesn’t support strict tables. Nightly does.

I moved to beaver and it’s mostly been fine.

My favorite for years - love it.

Looks very nice - I'm still hard-stuck in EJC, the convenience is just unbeatable.

The best

Would really like to have a dedicated DuckDB version of this please. Also, add in a few simple tools for analytics - basic chart, pivot table tool, ETL etc. Nothing fancy, just enough to scope out the data before building pipelines/reports etc.

No rush - tomorrow is fine :-)

Thanks.

Would love one that looks as slick as Supabase's web ui

Looks great, specially for not being yet another Chrome shell.

Good job!

It's an actual native app (Qt5). ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com