ShayanAbbas1/dbdelve

A fast, native, cross-platform, multi-engine database client. Written in Rust with GPUI, with no Electron and no JVM, so it starts quickly, uses little memory and keeps scrolling smoothly through large tables at which other clients crash or introduce limits.

Early days. Everything listed below works today.

DBDelve in action with 1M rows loaded.

I wanted something which is performant, modern and consumes little ram. The existing DB clients are either filled with bloat (Electron and JVM) or paid. This is an alternative to them. No feature is ever going behind a paywall and with time we will have complete parity on features with those too.

DBDelve 0.3.6 against DBeaver 25.3.1 on the same Postgres table, median of 5 runs each (2026-10-11, M1 Pro, 32 GB):

* Not a normal use case: this is the whole 1M-row table pulled into memory on purpose, with the row limit turned off, and that result is itself 4 GB of data. DBeaver needed its heap raised to 16 GB to finish it at all.

How these were measured, and the full results, are in BENCHMARKS.md.

• Postgres: supported
• MySQL: supported
• MariaDB: supported
• SQLite: supported
• Snowflake: supported, without in-line editing since Snowflake doesn't enforce primary keys. See docs/snowflake.md for setup.
• SQL Server: supported, 2017 or later, without Explain. See docs/mssql.md for what differs.
• MongoDB: supported, queried with mongosh statements like db.accounts.find({ status: "active" }). Browse, filter, sort, edit by _id, Explain and Format Query work as on the SQL engines. There are no transactions, so a batch of edits applies in order.

Support for other database engines is planned, and more will be added over time.

• Make it yours. A theme library with DBDelve's own Dark, Light and Black, the first two also in translucent glass, alongside favorites like Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox and Dracula, each in dark and light, and each of those in glass. Import themes from Zed or VS Code, or write your own; see docs/themes.md.
• Bring your connections with you. Import every saved connection, passwords and SSH settings included, from DBeaver on macOS, Linux and Windows, or from TablePlus on macOS.
• Never mistake prod for staging. Every connection keeps its own tabs, schema tree and history, and wears its own color in the title bar. Run it read-only, read-write or with full access, and DBDelve asks before anything destructive.
• Edits you can read first. Change a cell in place and DBDelve writes the UPDATE into the editor for you to check before it runs.
• Keyboard-first. A command palette for everything, fuzzy search across your schema, and every shortcut rebindable.
• Your SSH, not a reimplementation. Tunnels run through your own ssh, so your config, agent and hardware keys just work.

Free and open source, no telemetry, nothing behind a paywall.

Apple Silicon, macOS 12 or later — that's what it's built and tested on. Intel and older macOS aren't blocked by anything in the code, they're just untested.

Homebrew is the recommended way. It handles installing and upgrading:

brew install --cask ShayanAbbas1/dbdelve/dbdelve

macOS will refuse to open it the first time. DBDelve is signed ad-hoc: there's no Developer ID behind it and nothing is notarized, so Gatekeeper declines. Clearing the quarantine flag fixes this:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/DBDelve.app

Once per install, not once per launch — but an update is a new install, so you'll run it again after each one. Your connections and query history are kept outside the app and survive. macOS will ask once more for the saved passwords in your Keychain, because each release carries a different ad-hoc signature. I'll pay for a Developer ID if enough people end up using this, which removes all of the above.

Failing Homebrew, take the .dmg from the latest release and drag DBDelve to Applications. Same quarantine step and you have to update manually.

To build it yourself instead, DBDELVE_CHANNEL=release dev/bundle.sh produces target/DBDelve.app with the release build, icon and signature. Drag that to Applications; the quarantine step doesn't apply here.

Install from the AUR:

yay -S dbdelve-bin

It's maintained by @0PandaDEV, not by this project. Thanks for packaging it!

A tarball or an AppImage, x86_64 or aarch64, built on Ubuntu 22.04 — that is the oldest glibc either will run against, so anything at least that new is fine. X11 and Wayland both work, and you need a Vulkan or OpenGL driver, a Secret Service keyring (gnome-keyring or KWallet) for saved passwords, and xdg-desktop-portal for the export dialog.

Take dbdelve-<version>-linux-<arch>.tar.gz from the latest release and run the install.sh inside it:

tar xzf dbdelve-*-linux-*.tar.gz
cd dbdelve-*-linux-*/
./install.sh

Everything goes under ~/.local, so no root: the binary to ~/.local/bin, the icons and the desktop entry where your desktop looks for them, which is what puts DBDelve in the app menu. Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH — install.sh says so if it isn't. Updating means unpacking the next release and running it again; ./install.sh --uninstall reverses it and leaves your connections and query history alone.

Or take dbdelve-<version>-<arch>.AppImage from the same release, which is one file that runs where it lands:

chmod +x dbdelve-*.AppImage
./dbdelve-*.AppImage

It carries the libraries that are safe to carry and takes the graphics drivers from your machine, so it runs on distributions either side of the one it was built on. Running any AppImage needs FUSE 2, which Ubuntu 22.04 and later no longer install — sudo apt install libfuse2, or libfuse2t64 on 24.04 and later, is usually the only thing missing. Failing that, ./dbdelve-*.AppImage --appimage-extract unpacks it and squashfs-root/AppRun runs it with no FUSE at all.

What it does not do is put DBDelve in the app menu: an AppImage on its own is just a file you run, so there is no desktop entry and no icon until you integrate it — Gear Lever and AppImageLauncher both do that, or you copy the entry out by hand. The tarball does it for you, which is still the reason to prefer it. Updating either way is downloading the next one.

To build it yourself instead, on Debian or Ubuntu the build needs:

sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config cmake libfontconfig-dev \
  libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libwayland-dev libdbus-1-dev
cargo build --release

The binary lands at target/release/dbdelve and runs from anywhere; dev/package-linux.sh wraps that same build into the tarball above and dev/package-appimage.sh into the AppImage. Connections and query history go to $XDG_DATA_HOME/dbdelve, or ~/.local/share/dbdelve.

Chords are the same as macOS with Ctrl in place of Cmd. A profiles.toml carried over from a Mac keeps its cmd- overrides, which mean Super on Linux — rebind them in Settings.

A zip, x86_64, from the latest release. Unzip it and run dbdelve.exe. Nothing is installed. There is no installer.

To build it yourself instead, the build needs the MSVC toolchain and the Windows SDK, which is what compiles the bundled SQLite and GPUI's shaders:

cargo build --release

The binary is target\release\dbdelve.exe. Connections and query history go to %APPDATA%\dbdelve. Passwords go in Credential Manager. The window draws its own title bar, buttons included. Chords are the same as macOS with Ctrl in place of Cmd.

For discussions and ideas join the DBDelve discord server: https://discord.gg/upKpusAnS

brew upgrade --cask dbdelve, if you installed it that way. Otherwise the status bar links to the latest release once there is a newer one.

There is no telemetry. The only request DBDelve makes on its own is one to GitHub at startup to check for updates, which you can turn off in Settings.

MIT. See NOTICES.md for third-party font and theme licenses.