upmostly

Building DB Pro [1]

A complete desktop app for browsing and editing your Postgres, MySQL, SQLite data, creating beautiful dashboards, and soon designing automated workflows for repeat tasks.

[1] https://dbpro.app

I've kept a devlog of the last 10 months of building DB Pro, which has been the best way to bring users to the product. I'd highly recommend folks starting a devlog if they can.

That's fine. That's not what I dislike.

What I dislike is "AI SLOP" seems to be the default response to anything remotely creative anymore.

Finished reading the article, having really enjoyed it (I grew up with Terry's books), came back to the HN comments and the top comment is someone ranting "dIS iS aye-EyE sLoP"

What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.

We'll add an option in the next version to choose if you want to share usage data.

Stay tuned for v2.1.4, coming this week.

We're building a product [1] to compete with DataGrip, a JetBrains product.

Many people told us we were crazy to compete with such a mature product as DataGrip before we got started.

It has been fascinating to speak to people who use database apps and to learn about their experiences.

Now, we have many, many customers telling us that they have cancelled their DataGrip/JetBrains sub and have switched to using our product, mainly due to speed but also cost.

Their products are really, really slow.

[1] https://dbpro.app

I read this as satire.

I'm building DB Pro, a modern, beautiful, and now fully self-hosted database client for desktop and web.

Just launched Studio, which is the self-hosted version of DB Pro.

I also keep a devlog. #9 was just published to YouTube.

Self-Host Your Own Database Client | DB Pro Devlog #9 https://youtu.be/MJvSrJGtk70

[1]https://dbpro.app

Honest question: If my web browser struggles to even render the preview, why in god's name would I put any of these presets on a production webpage?

One of my favourite things of being on HN is reading comments like this. Namely, devs who worked on games I played growing up. I absolutely love hearing stories from their past about little technical nuances like this comment. The more technical / specific, the better.

I'd honestly love to compile a book of "war stories" told by devs like netcoyote.

Maybe I will.

Net, if you're interested, hit me up.

Seeing the Rust 1M benches were an amazing reminder as to how fast stuff really is.

100%.

Premature optimisation I believe that's called.

I've seen it play out many times in engineering over the years.

I'm feel like I could write another post: Do you even need serverless/Cloud because we've also been brainwashed into thinking we need to spend hundreds/thousands a month on AWS when a tiny VPS will do.

Similar sentiment.

Exactly. And most apps don't get there and therefore don't need it.

The irony isn’t lost on us, trust me. We spent a while debating whether to even publish this one.

But yeah, the page cache point is real and massively underappreciated. Modern infrastructure discourse skips past it almost entirely. A warm NVMe-backed file with the OS doing the caching is genuinely fast enough for most early-stage products.

Literally had to check the date with this one.

What?!

We went through the exact same dilemma with our product [1]. For desktop apps, one-off with a defined support window just feels right.

Users get certainty, and you still have a clear path to future revenue when that window expires.

Subscription makes a lot more sense once you’re in cloud/collaborative territory which we've just entered. Sounds like you landed in a good place with this split.

[1] https://dbpro.app/pricing

This comment was surprising to me.

I never considered that people want to watch a video in this day and age when they can try the real thing.

Perhaps I've fallen into that trap with the product [1] I'm building. I have a "Live Demo" button on the landing page and thought that would be enough? I'm going to reconsider...

1. https://dbpro.app

Thank you! That means a lot.

Interesting. I'm a big fan of MMORPGs so hearing that this is how they were made is really cool.

I've always wondered what kind of stack games like EverQuest were built on.

I thought about it, but, not surprisingly, that already exists.

https://pypi.org/project/chessql/

Thank you, and thanks for highlighting that. I'll take a look now.

Isn't this the same as

"Sent from my iPhone"?

Author here.

I had the idea of building a working Chess game using purely SQL.

The chess framing is a bit of a trojan horse, honestly. The actual point is that SQL can represent any stateful 2D grid. Calendars, heatmaps, seating plans, game of life. The schema is always the same: two coordinate columns and a value. The pivot query doesn't change.

A few people have asked why not just use a 64-char string or an array type. You could! But you lose all the relational goodness: joins, aggregations, filtering by piece type. SELECT COUNT(*) FROM board WHERE piece = '♙' just works.

Are we, though?

My experience has been almost all positive.

Devs love to give feedback. Devs have decent paying jobs, and therefore money to purchase devtools (ours is $79) Devs love trying out new things and being early adopters.

Why is it a terrible market?

I'm building and marketing a database client for the last 5 months, and what worked for me was:

1. Keeping a consistent devlog on YouTube. It's the #1 source of traffic.

2. Getting a rank 1, page 1 HN post for a technical blog post related to our product.

3. Word of mouth. It's slow, but it works.

Just thought I'd chip in. The devlogs work the best though. Plus they keep momentum.

I'm building DB Pro, a better database client.

I just released support for dashboards. I've kept a devlog for the past 6 months.

https://youtu.be/EEA73e6MH1c

And the biggest update is coming soon, DB Pro Cloud, which will let you connect to and manage any database through your browser as well as collaborate with your team.

Imagine Postman but for databases.

https://dbpro.app

First of all, Homeworld was an iconic game for me growing up, so as other people have said, thank you for being apart of its creation.

I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan websites for Quake 2.

That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and GitHub.

Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious apps.

Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to churn out a slightly different looking app.

The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the real problems.

Developers are pretty willing to pay for tools that save them daily friction, even in crowded spaces. I find that the trick is finding the wedge that makes yours feel essential rather than nice-to-have.

At the end of the day, people pay to save time. Doesn't matter if it's been done to death.

I find that when people can see what's coming, they're more invested in the product and more likely to share feedback that actually shapes the direction. The devlogs on YouTube serve the same purpose. It's a two-way street.

Thanks Steve! The team angle came from mine and my co-founder's own frustration. We kept copy-pasting query snippets and results of queries into Slack/Teams to our engineering team but also Sales/Marketing etc. Figured there had to be a better way. If you ever want to give it a spin, I'd love to hear your thoughts.