Apologies to Blue Öyster Cult – I couldn’t resist. The beaver is question is DBeaver. I was recently looking at a client issue and needed to import some data into a mariadb database on a hosted platform we use. This was not on my normal development machine where I would have a range of tools including heidisql to carry out the required task.
Instead I went looking to see if there was something that would let me work with the data and then potentially transfer it to another database platform once I had done some manipulation on it.
Enter the Beaver ! Having located the Dbeaver site – and created a connection to my online instance – it was trivial to get the data wrangled and give the client the results needed. The client couldn’t believe the quick turnaround !
The app claims a number of things but the three highlighted are what drew me to the app in the first place !
- Usability is the main goal of this project, program UI is carefully designed and implemented.
- It is free and open-source (ASL).
- It is multiplatform.
- It is based on opensource framework and allows writing of various extensions (plugins).
- It supports any database having a JDBC driver.
- It may handle any external datasource which may or may not have a JDBC driver.
- There is a set of plugins for certain databases (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Vertica, Informix, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, InfluxDB in version 5.x) and different database management utilities (e.g. ERD, data transfer, compare, data export/import, mock data generation, etc).
- It has a great number of features.
A new release 6.3.2 is just out with the following updates
- Database backup/restore/sql tools (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle) now can be saved as tasks
- Smart auto-commit mode was introduced (enable transactions vefore data modifying query execute)
- SQL editor:
- Alias generation was improved
- Output log flush eas fixed
- Default database assign (for SQL script) was fixed
- Data editor: advances paste now respects NULLs for dates and numbers
- PostgreSQL:
- $$ strings parser was fixed
- Domain type arrays support was fixed
- DB2 (iSeries, z/OS): new connection issue was fixed
- Oracle: session manager now shows servr-side execution plans (thanks to @SergDzh)
- MySQL: database backup/restore was fixed
- Firebird: unique key DDL was fixed
- Number of fixes and improvements in backup/restore tools
- Workspace switch: last chosen workspace is now saved between app restarts
- Dark theme support was improved (toolbars, dark colors customization)
- Eclipse 4.6 support was fixed
- Problem with missing toolbar buttons was fixed (Linux)
- A lot of minor bugfixes