0xDBE: JetBrains IDE for DBAs and SQL developers | Hacker News Reader

0xDBE: JetBrains IDE for DBAs and SQL developers

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155 pointsLaSombra68 comments

If you haven't tried them, test out their datasource tools in IntelliJ, which this seems to be mostly a repackaging of. Especially if using JPA, it's pretty incredible to be able to use all of the standard shortcuts (go to definition, etc) and inspections right into your development data environment.

The one that really killed me was that you can CTRL-Click on a foreign key in the data explorer and it will go to the row in the foreign table with that PK. Jetbrains has gone to such incredible effort so that the same gesture will perform the same action (or a reasonable analogy) in every context.

Why do they insist on a separate heavyweight installation for each functional area / language? IDEA (Java), PhpStorm, RubyMine, PyCharm, AppCode, WebStorm, and now 0xDBE? What if you were building something that used all of those? You'd be buying a license for 7 IDEs? What happened to the good 'ol plugin model?

I still prefer the lightweight Sublime Text to having to install all these monolithic Java-based IDEs, but I agree that the SQL/DBA tools have sucked for a long time -- especially a good cross-platform tool. Valentina Studio was the best I've found http://www.valentina-db.com/en/valentina-studio-overview -- has support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and their own proprietary db.

If you prefer the good ol' plugin model then you can buy IntellijIDEA and install all the language/platform specific plugins that you want.

One catch is that IntellijIDEA license costs about 2x the price of specialized IDE for your favourite platform.

The other catch is that JetBrains has individual teams for individual IDEs and thus IndellijIDEA plugins lag a bit behind the specialized solutions.

No need to get all worked up.

The plugins are not the same as the IDEs. For example PyCharm doesn't distinguish between project settings and IDE settings the way IntelliJ does. The UI for choosing your python version and virtualenv is baked right into the IDE settings where as that is not the case when you install the Python plugin in IntelliJ. The .idea directories also do not seem to be compatible across RubyMine and IntelliJ. I have mistakenly opened up the wrong project with RubyMine and it scrambled the .idea for a non-ruby project.

The same is true with WebStorm, the UI and features found in WebStorm are not the same as in the JavaScript plugin. You cannot buy IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and get all the features of all the other IDEs, you need to have separate licenses.

Indeed. Working with a Python (Django) project in IntelliJ IDEA is downright annoying: project setup is hard, and the Java stuff haunts you everywhere. While it's better than plain old Notepad, I can't recommend it for anything but the odd side project.

Another annoyance is they do not offer the database functionality in IntelliJ on WebStorm. The database plugins that can be installed on WebStorm are geared towards MySQL and Oracle. I use Postgres.

I wonder if it's worth trying to crowd fund a JavaScript IDE based on atom.

> You'd be buying a license for 7 IDEs? What happened to the good 'ol plugin model?

+1, it's ridiculous. My colleague switches between PhpStorm and IDEA depending upon which language she is writing in, so it's two licenses for us to absorb. I only use IDEA because doing Java without an IDE is painful, for everything else I use Sublime.

* edit for grammer

She doesn't need to be. Idea includes the PHP plugin which is basically PHPStorm thats lags a bit (usually negligibly)...

The licences are far cheaper than your colleague's time.

I used to have licenses for IntelliJ, RubyMine, and PyCharm. The customized IDEs are nicer to use: feels more light weight.

Now, I just use IntelliJ for the occasional Clojure and Java. If I need RubyMine or PyCharm, I just use the old versions I am licensed for.

If I was actively using Python and Ruby then I would keep the licenses up to date - well worth it.

> What if you were building something that used all of those? You'd be buying a license for 7 IDEs? What happened to the good 'ol plugin model?

We actually buy a license for each of these editors. We test our Floobits plugin for IntelliJ in each of these editors and they are significantly different enough that you should really have a copy of each. They also have different build numbers and different jar libraries included. This means there are differences in the code base and that could affect a plugin you might be building.

For example PyCharm ships with apache java libraries we also ship, and we used to have conflicts when PyCharm had a really old version. The different build numbers indicate different points of history in the IntelliJ code base. Some crucial plugin API may be in one build but not another.

Thankfully Jetbrains gave us a steep discount for the licenses to help us out. But even if I were not editing a plugin for Floobits I would still have to buy a license for PyCharm, WebStorm and IntelliJ separately because the Python and JavaScript plugins for IntelliJ do not have all the features the separate IDEs have.

I took a long time to setup Django and virtualenvs correctly so I can run and debug Floobits.com in PyCharm, I don't see any easy way to translate that work from PyCharm to IntelliJ with the Python plugin. Same with WebStorm. Many of our services are written in node.js and translating my setup from WebStorm to the IntelliJ plugin with JavaScript doesn't seem easy to do or even possible. It might just be I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm a big fan of IntelliJ, I'm not sure I agree w/ this - though it might be specific to your use case.

Can you note some specific features that are missing? I understand if one application requires a different way of doing something, but that doesn't necessary mean that functionality is missing or different.

One big set of features missing are the configuration options available in PyCharm. For example being able to configure Vagrant in PyCharm provides its own UI in the IDE settings. I have created a screenshot showing all the various PyCharm setting views compared to IntelliJ with the Python Plugin installed:

http://imgur.com/tKFnnkj.png

You can actually get some of the Vagrant features with a separate Vagrant plugin in IntelliJ, but PyCharm lets you set up the Python interpreter with Vagrant via a really nice UI.

Of course, that makes sense. That feature is under the Remote Interpreter in IntelliJ. Vagrant configurations can change between modules, which is why it's organized under IntelliJ under module settings -> SDKs.

So that falls under "hidden under a different area" in the IntelliJ project, not missing functionality.

The concept of modules in IntelliJ is not in PyCharm, I believe. Though, I could be wrong.

Their premium product intellij does have plugins that replicate the support of their standalone IDEs apart from I think AppCode. Not sure about the status of this.

This isn't the case actually. These plugins offer only a subset of the features of the various IDEs.

I think there are a lot of reasons, IDEA is a universal app that can't necessarily fit the workflow of every language perfectly whereas something like PHPStorm, it's pretty obviously supporting the technologies and tooling associated with a PHP app. I used WebStorm and PHPStorm for a while and finally bit the bullet and purchased IDEA because I develop in Java, PHP, Perl, Python and Node.js regularly enough that I'd prefer one IDE to rule them all. IDEA seems to prefer Java first though, whereas when I created a new project in PHPStorm it gave me prompts that would be (as you'd expect) much more relevant for a PHP app. Also, the cost is a factor- PHPStorm or WebStorm are significantly cheaper than IDEA- if I was had a primary dev stack that fit in one of the 'smaller' IDEs they provide, I'd be thankful that I was able to buy something less than the Cadillac IDE offering. Sidenote: I find IDEA to be a fantastic IDE and replaced Komodo ($200+) and Eclipse (free) with one that is much easier to use.

Along those same lines, why would a DBA want to pop for everything that IDEA supports when their primary goal is writing SQL?

Probably trying to stay distinct from Eclipse. Over a few years on the same computer, my Eclipse install would have dozens of plugins and take longer and longer to start up and have context menus a mile long. I think it makes good sense to draw a line somewhere.

At the moment all the 0xdbe functionality is available in IntelliJ IDEA and other IntelliJ-based IDEs via built-in plugins.

Actually most of those support most of the other features / languages via plugins. But they try to really emphasize and target the language specific IDE's towards that language itself.

Interesting to see JetBrains coming in that space. Their other IDE are really great to use, and I can see where they could compete with Oracle SQL Editor. I use it from time apto time, and try to stay away as much as possible, but knowing JetBrains great IDE, I may at least give it a try.

Yep, i have used TOAD for Oracle, it is not bad. But imho jetbrain's make very good ide's. I mostly interested in DB extensions (non standard SQL extensions, PL/SQL and PLPG/SQL) etc, because as was written most jetbrains ide have basic db's support.

I'm lost on the name. I mean, I know it's hex and the decimal is 3518 but.. what's its significance? Is there some hip way of pronouncing it? I currently use razorsql but don't tend to dive too deep.

Some sort of mashup between database (DB) and IDE makes DBE. Unsure why they prepended 0x to make it look hexidecimal.

Oh. Well that was way less interesting than expected.

This is a codename, it's pronounced "o-kzi-di-bi-i".

JetBrains have, by far, some of the best IDE out there. I'm personally a huge fan of IntelliJ. I just hope they roll out the C++ IDE for free, unlike WebStorm!

Main question ... pricing?

Really? Pricing is the main question? How about how much time does it save, relative to the up-front investment of learning a new tool? As a developer, your time is worth far more than nearly any piece of software you will buy!

It seems incredibly ironic that software developers have hangups around software pricing. With the amount of money you can make writing software, and the amount of time good tooling like this can save, it should be an absolute no-brainer. They even offer personal licenses and free versions for OSS developers.

The best justification I can think of is the non-free aspect. Any text editor requires a lot of up-front investment to master. As the centerpiece of a developer's workflow, developers could be justified in favoring an open-source editor to embrace. But if that's your reason, $1 is just as unpalatable as $1000.

Part of that investment is knowing how much it will cost. How can you know your time is worth more than X when X is undetermined?

I'm sure it's in the ballpark of any of their other specialized IDEs. Also not that the X I was referring to is your time invested, not your cash.

It shouldn't be the "main question" is all I'm saying.

> How can you know your time is worth more than X when X is undetermined?

For every other IDE made by Jetbrains, the cost is eclipsed by the cost of a developer's daily salary.

So if the IDE would save your developer one accumulative day in a year, it's paid for itself.

Sure it is. I use one of jetBrains IDEs as my main tool and it also have some DB tools integrated. Before adding one more tool to my toolset I need to know how much it will cost and how big return it can give me.

I think the "main question" you're looking for is whether it does much more than IntelliJ alone - not how much it costs. Price is a distant second to productivity gains. I agree that it is a factor, but in my experience software engineers tend to undervalue their time when it comes to tools.

Aqua Data Studio (http://www.aquafold.com/aquadatastudio.html) has some amazing features, though most of them are geared to DBA usage. Oh, and it's quite expensive (though not as much as Toad). I spend a significant amount of time writing SQL queries, so anything that makes it faster is worth checking.

The first time I tried to use the database tools integrated into PhpStorm (which are the same as the ones in IDEA), their SQL parser stumbled over PostgreSQL's ::type cast (try "select '2014-01-01'::date") and the next time I tried it, it stumbled over a CTE and failed to parse the rest of the query.

Yes. Both are simple bugs (I reported one of them, the other would be very difficult to reduce the test case for), but if I need a tool that's more advanced than plain psql, then it's for the big and complicated queries which this tool apparently isn't made for.

It's fine if it's a plugin for an otherwise mostly unrelated IDE (like in the case of PhpStorm, RubyMine or IDEA), but it's not at all acceptable if it's the main feature of a product.

As such we'll see which one happens: Either they make their database support arbitrary queries or their tool will just fail in its biggest use case (being a tool for the complicated queries where the text editor/native tool combo isn't sufficient.

Similar story here: the MSSQL DB integration in IntelliJ IDEA has never worked properly for me (schema support is terrible). They better make sure these things work if they want to release this as a separate product.

came here to ask for MSSQL support. i guess i have my answer.

Don't just take some guy's opinion for it. Download a trial and try it yourself.

JetBrains makes good products; it'd be a shame to avoid a useful tool just based on what one guy said.

Agreed, they might've just fixed my problems with this product release.

JetBrains make the best IDEs on the market, their products always surpass my expectations. I use their python IDE and the php IDE both fantastic products that are well worth the money(and i HATE paying for software). No i don't work for them and i am not affiliated with them i just happen to appreciate their amazing software.

> I use their python IDE and the php IDE both fantastic products that are well worth the money(and i HATE paying for software).

I don't think I've ever seen a better advertisement for a product.

Think about it: we're carpenters but we really don't want to pay for our hammers and saws! Paying for tools is fine, if they are good quality and give you a competitive advantage.

Fair comparison, but the difference is that we generally can get the hammers and saws free online. Choosing to pay for these products shows that they are superior to the other free ones which are available to us, and the paid ones can also be obtained for free if one chooses to do so (yes i know its illegal and wrong but its very common and easy).

I totally love JetBrains products. Haven't used many but my favorite is resharper. Totally took the pain out of coding. Formatting, following naming conventions and so much now looks so simple. Totally recommend them to anyone considering buying it. Worth every penny.

JetBrains makes some amazing tools but they still don't highlight the search field when you use the ctrl+F hotkey. I don't get it.

Open ticket (1+ year): http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-107627

My request, which has been closed: https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/requests/29892

JetBrains announcements are always pleasant surprises.

I wonder how this handles version control of schemas. I've been really impressed with PyCharm, so I trust these guys.

At work we're trying to integrate [http://www.red-gate.com/]'s SQL Source Control plugin, which is a huge pain. They prefer too much autodiscovery, which is just too finicky.

Some of these JetBrains IDE's are really good, and hopefully this will make the mind-numbing task of writing this a lot more pleasant. Here's to their eventual MongoDB support

Great news! Looks like they are going in the same direction as Datazenit ( http://datazenit.com )

Proper database management tools were long due.

Are you (JetBrains) going to offer those SQL features to PyCharm etc or will it always be a standalone (or it already exists but I never looked for it) ?

I believe that many of these features are already included in PyCharm, PHPStorm, etc...

Check the "Databases" under View -> Tool Windows

Thanks, somehow missed it all this time

SQLite will definitely benefit from this. So far it seems the space for SQLite DB admin is pretty sparse, despite its high usage in mobile apps.

If you are on a mac Base is about as good as they come. http://menial.co.uk/base/

Navicat works well for me (though I've done very little with SQLite dbs thusfar)

Looks nice so far, JetBrains certainly puts out solid products. Will have to compare it with Aqua Data Studio when the final is released.

Seems awesome, but they need a better name.

0xdbe is a codename, not the final one, so please feel free to suggest other names! :-)

Even something as simple as xdbe (cross db explorer or cross db+ide?) would work. The whole hex thing makes me look again thinking it's an error code.

If they can pull that off for all DB engines it would be very interesting to have unified DB IDE.

Looks great, I'm tired of using a different program for every database type I have.

I use Navicat on OSX; I've queried and managed SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and even SQLite databases with it.

Now, if they'd just release (a preview of) their C++ IDE… It's been months: http://blog.jetbrains.com/objc/2014/02/jetbrains-c-ide-statu...

Since this post is located so prominently on the front page of HN I would like to use this opportunity to implore fellow HNers to go and vote for GoLang Plugin/IDE.

The issue is located this way: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-5938

aw, no postgresql support. How come?

Where does it say that? PostgreSQL is third from the left in the list of supported DBs on the front page.

3rd logo from the left.

What makes you think that?

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