I maintain tens of applications with real user data. Every few days something needs a human: check what a row says, fix a bad value, clear a stuck record. Thirty seconds of real work, a few times a week.
I’ve used DBeaver for years and it’s a serious tool — it’s just built for a bigger job than the one I keep doing. The commercial clients are nicer and cost hundreds a year per seat to edit data on machines I already pay for. So I built the narrow version I wanted.
DBison is a desktop client for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and SQLite.
Windows, macOS, Linux.
What you get:
- A grid that edits in place. Changes stage up, save in one transaction, and show you the exact SQL before they run.
- A read-only connection mark that holds. It’s enforced below the UI, so a bug or a mispaste can’t get around it. DELETE or UPDATE with no WHERE stops and asks. Each connection has its own colour.
- An editor that knows your schema — completion from live metadata, foreign-key-aware JOIN suggestions, run-statement-at-cursor, visual EXPLAIN.
- A UI from this decade — dockable tabs and splits that survive a restart, command palette, keyboard-driven explorer, no wizards, light and dark.
- CSV import with column mapping, streamed exports, SSH tunnels, SSL, passwords in the OS keychain.
It’s free and it stays free: no tiers, no seat limits, no feature gates.
Donations are the whole business model. No accounts, no telemetry, no
analytics — apart from your databases, the only thing it talks to is the
update check. Open sourced on Github.
Windows builds aren’t code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn on first run.
Tell me what breaks.