We are glad to show you live examples of how specialists from different fields use DBeaver. Today we want to share an interview with Ryan Michael Gelig, founder of SugboDoc.

This platform aims to bring all of a patient’s medical information together in one place, making it easier for healthcare providers to understand a patient’s health history and make informed decisions about their care. Ryan has been designing healthcare information systems for the past seven years for hospitals, long-term care, telehealth, and ambulatory care settings. We asked him several questions about his use cases and experience with DBeaver.

Please tell us about your work. Which tasks does DBeaver help you solve?

My team is designing, maintaining, and migrating the SugboDoc database system. With DBeaver, we can easily create connections to various database servers for engineering, testing, and staging. When making changes to the system, it is easy to update the tables and schema.

It’s convenient to use the Data Editor to view, search and update table data. We also write and execute SQL scripts with SQL Editor. One of our most frequent tasks is to compare databases via Schema Compare and generate database upgrade and migration scripts.

What DBeaver features do you like the most?

I can name three main features we love and use all the time. Firstly, I want to point out the support of many import and export data types. We can import a CSV, Excel file, XML file, and database table. DBeaver is flexible and intuitive to detect the datatype and the column mapping between the input source file and the resulting database column. We can export an even broader target, such as HTML, JSON, TXT, and more. With this feature, we leverage the power of Microsoft Excel to clean, sort, and reformat the data, and then easily import the Excel File to DBeaver.

The second feature is Schema Compare. It allows us to compare two sets of databases, and then generate a migration script to bridge the two versions of databases. We use this in migration when we need to align and upgrade the schemas of the engineering and production database.

And last but not least, I want to mention the Data Editor and the intuitive interface to update tables and schemas.

Has the use of DBeaver affected the efficiency and speed of your work?

The three features I mentioned have sped up our workflow and drastically shortened our work. What took us 7 man-days for every month, or an equivalent of about 56 man-hours, to generate and manually code scripts and maintain the database has gone down to just about 1 hour.

What do you want to improve in our app?

DBeaver has really given us a ton of productivity and efficiency improvements as a Universal Database Tool. We suggest creating closer integration in the software development workflow with tools such as Visual Studio Code, Jira, Slack, and GitHub.

In addition, which is quite a stretch, we will be glad if DBeaver team expands the app capabilities for Big Data visualization.

And it also would be great to have the integration with OpenAI’s GPT-3 so that generated scripts by the likes of ChatGPT could then be visualized via an expanded DBeaver’s Data Visualization API to generate charts and dashboards.

Author: