I started to develop DbGate at the end of 2019. Main reason was, that I switched from Windows to Linux, where it was quite hard to find any usable database tool.
DbGate goals
- Complete free and open source, no paid enterprise editions
- Simple, but powerful. One toolbar, no milions of icons without description. Heavy use of context menu
- Runs everywhere - Windows, Linux, Mac, web browser, maybe also mobile web in future
- Stable and robust. Critical error in one database driver must not influence stability of the app
- Prepared for big databases - never load full table or query result into memory, use streams everywhere
- Scriptable, using dbgate nodejs packages
About author
My name is Jan Prochazka, I live in Czech Republic. I was specialized to realtime computation software, which used heavy Miccrosoft SQL Server. Now I work mainly with JavaScript and modern techology stack around it. I am also creating music software for pianists, PianoHub.
Motivation
I started to create database manager tools in 2010. All my tools develope3d in past were under commercial license.
My first DB admin tool was DatAdmin, which has larger supported database set (eg. Oracle or Effiproz).
The second generation was DbMouse, which was designed only to work only with MS SQL Server. It comes with idea of open-source db engine (called DbShell) implementing low-level operations on DB, on the DbShell gear was built GUI under classical commercial license. It was also rebranded as SQL database studio, it had slighly better sales performance than DbMouse, but it was not enough.
As I was unable to increase sales enough to make development of these tools profitable, I decided to cempletely abandon this effort.
Primary reason, why I started to develop DbGate, is to survive my know-how about database tools, and substantialize into modern, usable and open-source database tool. Of course, I am trying to assure some financial backing, I realize, that it will be very hard, maybe not possible, to cover full development expenses. If you want to help achieve this, you can support DbGate.
My plans doesn’t include anything like creating Professional or Ultimate paid editition, I want to try keep full DbGate as free and open source software. I can’t promise, that I will maintain this software forever, but currently I am commited to make DbGate yet a bit better, even without proper financial backing.
Wrote about us
DbGate was published on Hacker News. You can read large discussion about DbGate and other SQL clients.
You can see, what wrote about DbGate Softpedia software catalog portal
DbGate technology stack
- DbGate frontend is built with excellent Svelte framework. Formerly is was build with React
- Backend uses node.js
- Application uses electron
- Web version is distributed as docker container
Feedback
Any feedback is welcome, please create issue on GitHub