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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if anyone here has any experience with DbBeaver and HeidiSQL and can make a comparison. I've been using DbBeaver for a while, but the interface is... strange. Will probably try Heidi tomorrow.

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I've been using HeidiSQL since around 2008(?) at my first job. What I like the most about Heidi is the UI for generating queries and editing left/right joins in a graphical manner. So you can use it to "prototype" your queries first, try them out, see the results, and then copy/paste them into your code, which is a supernice experience, including for beginners that haven't had much experience with SQL databases and lack the "feeling" of how to decouple datasets into tables.

I was trying out DBeaver a lot, actually, but a couple of things here and there didn't work as expected. Sometimes I had problems with batch selections that I couldn't reproduce so I was then most of the time switching back to HeidiSQL in my wine sandbox when it didn't work, out of frustration.

To me it's really great to see Heidi getting revived into a community software again, I really missed the tool a lot since I've made the switch to Linux as my daily driver everywhere. Wine's double click seemless windows aren't really nice and sometimes really annoying.

Yeah, DbBeaver is a slow behemoth while HeidiSQL is like 2 MB snappy lean and mean exe.

Works great in Wine before this native version came about.

When I switched to Linux full time, I had to ditch Heidi as they didn’t have a Linux version. I actually prefer dbeaver now, Heidi had some odd defaults (default collation especially) which need attention but you don’t realise it until too late. It also was a bit crashy here and there.

DBeaver has the worst name in history but it can do everything Heidi does and doesn’t fall over every 20 minutes. The buttons are all over the place and it’s harder to navigate than Heidi but it’s also standard on a few distros.

I’m glad it has some competition though. If you’re working with sql server Microsoft have really dropped the ball with SSMS and don’t talk to me about azure data studio it is a undergraduate project that got a C.

I was switching a lot between SQLite, pawl, Marian and sql server and dbeaver is excellent on all of them

I feel like dbeaver works with all of them. It never feels like a pleasure to use, unlike Heidi, which actively feels like it makes working with databases nicer.

I've found Dbeaver struggles with large tables or databases with a lot of tables, often going out of memory unless I click the GC button every 10 seconds.

Meanwhile Heidi is fine.

> DBeaver has the worst name in history

Hey man. You take that back.

GIMP would like a word...

I've used both; DBeaver for personal stuff, Heidi at work. Heidi has a much more intuitive interface, IMHO

With DBeaver I was able to use tnsnames.ora to use a few tricks to connect to an oracle db

It required certain host/user/cid combination to pass the whitelist.

For me, DbBeaver is jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Seems to handle every database known to mankind, but not a fantastic user experience. While HeidiSQL is a work of art for MySQL / MariaDB, but not much else. I use & appreciate both in different ways.

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