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Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS

(menial.co.uk)
676 points __bb | 2 comments | 25 Aug 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.411s | source

I recently released v3 of Base, my SQLite editor for macOS.

The goal of this app is to provide a comfortable native GUI for SQLite, without it turning into a massive IDE-style app.

The coolest features are

- That it can handle full altering of tables, which is quite finicky to do manually with SQLite.

- It has a more detailed display of column constraints than most editors. Each constraint is shown as an icon if active, with full details available on clicking the icon.

This update also adds support for attaching databases, which is a bit fiddly with macOS sandboxing.

I'd love to hear any feedback or answer any questions.

Show context
gwbas1c ◴[25 Aug 25 15:23 UTC] No.45014862[source]▶
> Create and modify tables with ease using Base's visual table editor. No need to write complex CREATE or ALTER statements.

I'm trying to understand who your target audience is? Normally, I think of SQLite as something that only a programmer would use. (And thus these kind of statements happen within an application.)

What kind of use cases are you handling where someone is manually creating / changing a schema?

> Import data from CSV and SQL dump files. Export your results to SQL, delimited text, JSON, and Excel formats.

IE, who's using SQLite in this way, and what are they using it for?

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1. tracker1 ◴[25 Aug 25 15:43 UTC] No.45015101[source]▶
Potentially about anyone who used Access without the forms interfaces... While I'm not the biggest fan, I know a lot of people who prefer a visual editor for table schema creation. They'll use SQL Management Studio, or whatever equivalent with other DBMS and edit that way instead of DB specific queries... For example, re-ordering fields is destructive in a lot of DBMS and the queries get painful, a visual editor eases this burden.

As to importing/exporting data (csv, etc), You can't exactly run queries against a CSV generally (I mean you can with JET/ODBC, but still)... it's a chore.

To another point, I often feel that sqlite is a great backup format for data, it's portable, you can query directly, etc. I kind of wished that Azure Data Studio (now discontinued) had directly supported loading CSV/TXT etc into an in-memory or temp db for queries and portability similar to mentioned between various data sources (sqlite, mssql, pgsql, etc).

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2. RyanHamilton ◴[25 Aug 25 17:31 UTC] No.45016392[source]▶
>kind of wished that Azure Data Studio (now discontinued) had directly supported loading CSV/TXT etc into an in-memory or temp db for queries and portability QStudio supports right click query csv,txt,parquet via duckdb. It also supports more exotic data sources like rest apis by placing the data into a temp table. I called it babeldb https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/csv-file-viewer