There is a growing trend toward user-friendly database management tools. DBeaver’s intuitive design and modern capabilities attract users transitioning from less efficient or outdated systems. Michael Donnelly, Institutional Policy Analyst at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls, tried DBeaver Community first and then upgraded to DBeaver Lite Edition for more comprehensive data analysis and reporting. Michael shared his experience with DBeaver, everyday use cases, favorite features, and things he would like to improve in our tool.
Please tell us about your work. Which tasks does DBeaver help you solve?
My job title is Independent Policy Analyst. And it’s just an official title that the University of Wisconsin system uses to cover the work of people like me. The generic term for what I do in the United States is institutional research. In our team, we have access to various databases that store student records, all kinds of records having to do with courses, talks, often grades that people got and what majors they were, etc. Our job is twofold. On the one hand we report out standard statistics about patterns of student success to various stakeholders. On the other hand, we also do custom studies, sometimes because people we work with have new questions about how student success is related to something or other, or sometimes because we ourselves think of new ideas about how best to study educational outcomes. So we need a tool to interact with our data, that both handles simpler and repetitive, boilerplate stuff with efficiency and ease, and at the same time allows us to work up novel queries quickly, and handles iterative development well.
I use DBeaver for different tasks, but I should mention that I’m a recent newcomer to this tool. Previously, we used Oracle’s Hyperion Interactive Studio, a pretty old tool. It has been out-of-support for many years, but educational investigators around the United States still use it. Somebody gave us a list of possibilities (SQL Developer, Toad, DBeaver, and others). I told myself, “I know DBeaver a little from my time as a student, so I’ll try that.” My initial requirement was that the tool allow me to copy/paste queries developed in Oracle, and they should run immediately without needing to be cleaned up. DBeaver did so without modification, so here we are!
We do a lot of reporting which contains scores, KPIs, key performance indicators, and things like the number of people who enrolled, how many came back for their second year of enrollment, and how many finished their degrees in four years. We break that down by the date of enrollment. So, if we already have the scripts written, we can run them in DBeaver and output the new data.
What DBeaver features do you like the most?
At first, I used DBeaver Community, but then I decided to upgrade to DBeaver Lite since it has a Visual Query Builder. I like this visual representation of my tables and the links between them, as it significantly helps me. Generally speaking, many of the other query tools I’ve looked at are not as intuitive as DBeaver.
One of my current projects involves data from a survey with over a thousand individual items. There are two of us here and we have to do this every year. Over a thousand data points! I’m trying to automate this process by building the back end. Right now, it’s just SQLite, but I’m going to put it into a Postgres or Redshift database. I’m finally getting to do that, and DBeaver is right there in the sweet spot of being sophisticated enough and powerful enough to do some exciting things.
Another thing that may be pretty common, not just in higher education, is that there are all these departments around, and everybody has their little chunk of data, often on Excel spreadsheets. I’m starting to get these chunks of data, reformatting them, then feeding them through a tool I’ve built. I’ve only just now run the first test case of this and then put it into my custom tables to run queries against it in DBeaver.
Additionally, I like the DBeaver’s compatibility with different SQL dialects, including niche ones.
Has the use of DBeaver affected the efficiency and speed of your work?
When I run the same scripts on Oracle’s Hyperion and DBeaver, the second tool gives me the execution result twice as fast. This way, I could find out that the lag I was experiencing with Hyperion was on my end. It wasn’t really the query engine on the other end. A modern approach and a good understanding of how query engines work have allowed DBeaver to become a very effective tool in terms of performance.
What do you want to improve in our app?
Yeah, one of the things, one of the goals I had for it, and I haven’t quite figured out how to make this work efficiently for my style of work, is I need to be able to structure query results in such a way that they feed right into the back end for some Tableau visualizations. And I’m sure people are doing that. And I’ve read a little bit here or there. So I need to make it so that there are some transformations that I want to do to the data, but I haven’t figured out how to use DBeaver to do it.
Another thing I would like to see in DBeaver is pivot tables. I work with Tableau quite a bit, and as long as Tableau has been around, it still doesn’t work well with pivot tables. The same thing is true for Excel, as long as it has been around, its pivot tables feature is just clunky, and using them is painful. So I think it would be a killer feature of DBeaver.
A note from the DBeaver team: DBeaver Enterprise, DBeaver Ultimate and DBeaver Team Edition have a Tableau integration. You can find more information about this functionality on this Wiki page.
Key takeaways from Michael’s experience with DBeaver Lite
Michael was searching for a modern and stable database management tool to migrate from the legacy system. After switching to DBeaver Lite, he can work with the old data and import and execute scripts he has already written in different SQL dialects. Michael was impressed by the advanced data analysis and visualization capabilities of DBeaver Lite.
Check out the comparison table on our website to choose the DBeaver Edition with the functionalities you need. You can also try any of these tools for free with a 14-day trial version.
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