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Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS

(menial.co.uk)
676 points __bb | 3 comments | 25 Aug 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.603s | 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. cosmic_cheese ◴[25 Aug 25 17:53 UTC] No.45016671[source]▶
Visual browsers are very nice for exploring and pulling data out of databases that aren’t under your control, such as those used by apps. For example, first-party Apple apps nearly all use SQLite locally, and so with a browser you can peer into and hack on their data storage.
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2. gwbas1c ◴[25 Aug 25 18:32 UTC] No.45017241[source]▶
But then why would you:

> Create and modify tables with ease using Base's visual table editor. No need to write complex CREATE or ALTER statements.

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3. mpyne ◴[25 Aug 25 19:14 UTC] No.45017763[source]▶
Same reason why would you build a form in VB or Xcode rather than coding it all out.

Even if you need the actual instantiated schema to pass to SQLite in your source code, that's easy to obtain after-the-fact if this app doesn't output it directly, using `.schema` from the SQLite CLI.