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by staticlibs 831 days ago
DBeaver works surprisingly nicely with less popular DBs. I work with Babelfish for PostgreSQL [1], it supports connections with SQL Server client libs. Most GUI client tools (like SSMS) expect "real" SQL Server on the other end of the wire - depend on various system views for DB introspection, so only partially work with Babelfish. Even if client tool is based on JDBC (like SQuirell SQL), it doesn't guarantee that this tool won't use additional SQL Server-specific queries for introspection. DBeaver is much better at this, I guess it is using JDBC API or DB-neutral INFORMATION_SCHEMA views for introspection.

[1] https://babelfishpg.org/

3 comments

I personally like the ER diagram viewer in DBeaver. On a project with very little documentation, it was extremely pleasing to point it to the staging database and be able to visualize the relationships between various entities.
SchemaSpy can generate static docs based on a live db, and they include pretty good ER diagrams (IMO).

They have a sample on their website (go to the relationships section):

https://schemaspy.org/samples/epivirusurf/

The convenience factor is that you don't need a continuous connection to the db to refer to the diagrams or other docs.

The free version supports a few, but you need to pay $500 a year if you to talk to more databases or want security or cloud features:

https://dbeaver.com/edition/

It's a great tool, though, a bit buggy but most useful.

In what way is the free version lacking security?
They do use JDBC and even allow you to customize your choice of driver version for a db. It is a bit clunky when one has to resolve missing dependencies but that's just how it works I guess.