Building and improving DBeaver apps is a complex process that involves not only our developers and QA engineers but also the technical support team. Support engineers are among the best DBeaver experts because they use our tools daily.
Today, we talked to Nikita, our Technical Support Engineer. He assists users with resolving technical issues and filing appropriate bug reports and feature requests for our dev team. Nikita also works as a solution architect by conducting demos and answering technical questions. It helps prospects validate our products in terms of their specific use case.
We asked Nikita a few questions about his experience with DBeaver.
How do you use DBeaver?
Among DBeaver features I use often and like the most:
– SQL Editor with autocomplete and validation – to create correct queries quickly;
– ER diagrams – to view all the database objects and relations;
– Metadata Editor and DDL generation – to write valid CREATE queries;
– Backup/restore – to create backups via convenient UI instead of the command line.
Besides this, DBeaver helps me work with data. For many use cases like viewing, editing and filtering data, a spreadsheet editor like Excel is the standard choice. However, I tend to dislike the experience, mostly because it’s not convenient to control all the changes and work with complex data types in XLSX files.
This is where the combination of DBeaver and SQLite works well for me. For example, one of the users recently shared with me an XLSX file with data that I needed to analyze and clean up. Most likely, all this could be done in Excel. However, I found it more convenient to use a database for such tasks, so I imported the file to SQLite and applied the filtering and ordering I needed to get the result.
Why do you like our app?
I like DBeaver because it is similar to a Swiss army knife. You can do lots of different database-related stuff with it.
DBeaver works on all major operating systems, which is vital as I use macOS, Linux, and Windows (and I’m in love/hate relationships with all of them).
What do you want to improve in our app?
I find some of the UIX parts bloated and unpolished. DBeaver is a powerful tool with many functionalities, but it sometimes shows another side of the coin by making the app’s visuals a bit noisy. I’d reduce distractions in UI and fix some rough edges UX-wise. For example, it might not be obvious to some users how to perform database-specific tasks like dump and restore for MySQL or PostgreSQL, because of the complicated and bulky feature design. Therefore, it seems to me important to work on the terminology and intuitiveness of the interface, which will help improve the user experience.
