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.
For whatever reason, this is the main limiting factor, local software can already be really good, for example:
• DBeaver - pretty nice and lightweight local tool for a plethora of databases https://dbeaver.io/
• DataGrip - commercial product, but you'll feel right at home if you use other JetBrains products https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/
• HeidiSQL - haven't really used this myself but the version graph on the page is cool https://www.heidisql.com/
• DbVisualizer - really cool tool that helps you explore messy schemas https://www.dbvis.com/
• Jailer - something for exploring datasets, a bit niche, but can be useful https://wisser.github.io/Jailer/
There's also some solutions that are specific to certain databases, like:
• pgAdmin - for PostgreSQL https://www.pgadmin.org/
• MySQL Workbench - for MySQL/MariaDB, sometimes a bit buggy but I really like the reverse engineering and forward engineering functionality https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/
• Adminer - one of the somewhat rare web based solutions for the likes of MySQL/MariaDB, actually pleasant to use as long as you use it securely, this I think is a good example of web based DB tools https://www.adminer.org/
(out of respect for my own sanity, not mentioning SQL Developer, even though it sort of works)
As a graphic artist, I even get enthusiastic for a lot of the marketing, but as a freelance IT consultant, I tend to lose all motivation for selling my services the nanosecond I achieve sufficient income to get by, and revert to spending my time exploring and tinkering. We all have our own blind/weak spots.
I have often thought that some kind of service to pair creatives/engineers with professional development/managers would be really useful. I think that’s just called “LinkedIn”, but something more explicitly about entrepreneurial endeavors would be nice.
Azure Data Studio is pretty good and free to use. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-data-studio
Supports of course most MS products but also: PostgreSQL MySQL MongoDB Apache Spark Apache Cassandra
- https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/ - electron based and I find it really simple to use.
- https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls - generate markdown docs from databases (similar to DbVisualizer, but it's a static binary and you can just push the md files - see https://github.com/bbkane/envelope/tree/master/dbdoc for example)
Everyone I've seen either pivots to a Retool competitor or a BI tool.
Source: I've tried it twice.
Biggest limitation right now is its lack of support for vector style databases like Lance, qdrant, etc.
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
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
Why?
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.
It even has a demo: https://demo.dbgate.org/
https://firstpagesage.com/marketing/average-cac-for-saas-bus...
And these are consumers:
> definitely lots of devs who want easy DB access and would pay
"Software developer" typically refers to an occupation (whether self-employed or working for a corporation), so products for developers would also be classified as B2B rather than B2C.
By the way, another fundamental issue with your link is that it's SaaS, while this is about a desktop app
> so products for developers would also be classified as B2B rather than B2C.
Only if those devs buy it as a business, not individuals like what we're discussing here.
So basically you can't get to any relevant CAC number from your link
At the last company I worked for I made a command to ssh into our servers and extract job data. I saved the data in a local SQLite database. Then I made a dashboard in table plus to show the it in a chart that would refresh every second.
I had a real-time dashboard in about an hour once I figured out all the job info I wanted to capture. It was really cool!
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?
I think the problem is that demand/interest is not sufficient to keep a self-hosted project going, nor monetisable enough for a hosted one. People wanting to self-host end up going with something more specific, possibly self-made, for their needs, rather than a generic solution, and a hosted solution has a couple of significant costs to cover:
1. Resource use when people load a large amount of data then run under-optimised queries on it (or impossible to optimise, if they've chosen a bad structure for what they want out of the data). This can be mitigated by throttling individual users' IO/memory/CPU use but then the product gets a reputation for being slow.
2. The support that many people will expect (especially if they are paying, but even if they are not) which could consume a lot of time. A project that is very lucky might end up with a community that takes on a good amount of this load, but you can't bank on being that lucky.
3. Resource to keep available all the hardly used, or even never used, projects that will sit around if the service is free. Mitigating this with cold storage will help, but as with throttling active use this will make the service appear slow generally (people will remember the tens-of-seconds startup time more than they will notice subsequent actions being more than fast enough).
Getting people to pay will be an uphill struggle, and money from advertising is unlikely to cover the above, especially with many people like me blocking commercial stalking which also blocks a lot of advertising.
There are many commercial services and tools. Like Notion and Airtable and all their clones. For more advanced users and usecases there are those like Metabase, Retool and all their clones. But they are more focused on specific domains. And today it's quite easy to just barf up some CRUD-interface with webstack, especially now that AI is good enough for simple stuff.