Long time user of HeidiSQL here. I respect the author a lot. He's been tirelessly working on this project for many years, mostly alone. Of course, that's due to the closed nature of Delphi.
It's great news that this is now available for Linux, but the better news for me is that I can now build it on Lazarus / FreePascal. Even if it doesn't support all the features (eg MSSQL), at least I can now contribute fixes for some UI issues that have been bothering me.
I can successfully build the FreePascal version on Windows and it runs... fine. Feels a little less snappy than the Delphi version and there are some UI padding issues. But it's a massive step in the right direction.
If you can, please support this project, either financially or through code. contributions. IHMO what is dearly needed is for the different SQL dialects to be abstracted out properly. It's currently done in a bit of a crude way (no disrespect to the author) and it will require a big refactoring to get it right, but will open doors to more dialects.
Very good news that the Freepascal version compiles and works correctly also on Windows. As you said, Delphi was a huge barrier to prevent other developers to contribute, but if we can use Lazarus, Heidi can receive a lot of help not only for Linux version but also for Windows one.
Probably, thanks to Freepascal / Lazarus, it can be ported easily also to Mac OS now.
Depending on how OS-independent it is, it might just be a matter of opening the project file and selecting Run -> Build (yes, the fact that Build is under Run is something that always bothered me, but it has been like that for 22+ years now). However the resulting app will be very "win-like" and when i was making macOS builds using Lazarus back when i cared about macOS i always had a "Macize" function i called at startup (ifdef'd for mac builds) that did things like replace the Ctrl modifier shortcuts with Command in menus (you can enumerate the menus, no need to do that by hand), move the About command to the apple menu, etc. There are also some other things that you may feel like doing.
TBH one thing that i wish was possible with Lazarus (at the time, now i don't care much :-P) was to be able to define different "layouts" per widgetset in a way that allowed you to use, say, a 'default' layout for Windows and Linux but a modified layout for macOS. Technically it is possible to design a form and then have another form inherit from it and apply modifications there, but it feels kinda awkward to use for different layouts (it is mainly meant for creating forms that you want to reuse but still have modifications - and it can be clunky in how it decides when to ignore changes in the base form or not - i do not use visual form inheritance, but i do use frames to design reusable controls visually and i often have to edit the source code of form files that use frames to remove overrides after saving the form so that changes to the frame are reflected in all forms that use it - this makes me want to add a readonly property to frames at some point :-P).
Right, but having a unique codebase and one development tool for Linux, Windows and Macos (probably), would help a lot to reduce the effort to maintain the application.
HeidiSQL is free software for people who work with databases, and aims to be intuitive to use. "Heidi" lets you connect to a variety of databases, like MariaDB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Interbase and Firebird.
Since some days it is finally available in a native Linux version.
The code has been ported from Delphi to FreePascal / Lazarus.
I'm curious if anyone here has any experience with DbBeaver and HeidiSQL and can make a comparison. I've been using DbBeaver for a while, but the interface is... strange. Will probably try Heidi tomorrow.
I've been using HeidiSQL since around 2008(?) at my first job. What I like the most about Heidi is the UI for generating queries and editing left/right joins in a graphical manner. So you can use it to "prototype" your queries first, try them out, see the results, and then copy/paste them into your code, which is a supernice experience, including for beginners that haven't had much experience with SQL databases and lack the "feeling" of how to decouple datasets into tables.
I was trying out DBeaver a lot, actually, but a couple of things here and there didn't work as expected. Sometimes I had problems with batch selections that I couldn't reproduce so I was then most of the time switching back to HeidiSQL in my wine sandbox when it didn't work, out of frustration.
To me it's really great to see Heidi getting revived into a community software again, I really missed the tool a lot since I've made the switch to Linux as my daily driver everywhere. Wine's double click seemless windows aren't really nice and sometimes really annoying.
When I switched to Linux full time, I had to ditch Heidi as they didn’t have a Linux version. I actually prefer dbeaver now, Heidi had some odd defaults (default collation especially) which need attention but you don’t realise it until too late. It also was a bit crashy here and there.
DBeaver has the worst name in history but it can do everything Heidi does and doesn’t fall over every 20 minutes. The buttons are all over the place and it’s harder to navigate than Heidi but it’s also standard on a few distros.
I’m glad it has some competition though. If you’re working with sql server Microsoft have really dropped the ball with SSMS and don’t talk to me about azure data studio it is a undergraduate project that got a C.
I was switching a lot between SQLite, pawl, Marian and sql server and dbeaver is excellent on all of them
I feel like dbeaver works with all of them. It never feels like a pleasure to use, unlike Heidi, which actively feels like it makes working with databases nicer.
I've found Dbeaver struggles with large tables or databases with a lot of tables, often going out of memory unless I click the GC button every 10 seconds.
For me, DbBeaver is jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Seems to handle every database known to mankind, but not a fantastic user experience. While HeidiSQL is a work of art for MySQL / MariaDB, but not much else. I use & appreciate both in different ways.
If you have the license for it, it is hard to beat Datagrip from Jetbrains. Support for just about any database and also integrated support for AI/Copilot making it much easier to write exploratory queries.
I used Datagrip like 10 years ago and it was amazing, back then I used some pre-release evaluation thingy, loved it, was only working with mysql though.
last year i looked at it again, in a project where mongodb is used, it did not perform so well, sure the features where there, but still mongodb is document orientated so i had to come up with workarounds and so ... yeah back to cli unfortunately
but for any relational database, I'd rather use datagrip!
For simpler use-cases I've used both https://dataflare.app/ and https://tableplus.com/ with success. They are much quicker and lighter to start-up, browse some tables and run some queries.
Free versions are generous enough for daily use as well. For example for TablePlus "The free trial is limited to 2 opened tabs, 2 opened windows, 2 advanced filters (filters are not available on the free TablePlus Windows) at a time."
I suppose it has more advanced features than IntelliJ?
Because when I switched to MacOS I had to find a replacement for HeidiSQL and, to my surprise, I was able to do everything I wanted to directly from IntelliJ, which was already my main IDE.
Heidi was the default option on our work machines a few years ago and it’s one of the buggiest pieces of software I’ve ever used.
Does it still lock up the entire UI if a query takes longer than five seconds to return results? Does it still pop up exception dialogs every ten minutes when it’s been open for longer than a few hours?
HeidiSQL has its quirks and occasional rough edges, but it's certainly simpler and more straightforward to use than DBeaver, the other common free SQL client that is sometimes recommended.
I prefer Heidi where the DB setup allows it, and use DBeaver as a backup.
This is my exact experience with DBeaver. Absolutely cannot stop all the frustrating popups. Finally got fed up and started using vim+dadbod and while the experience is a bit less batteries-included, I was mostly just using DBeaver to run raw SQL anyway, and have been on vim for over a decade so that's an option for me. Now my SQL queries live in per-project versioned files instead of some eclipse project folder somewhere and I can edit them with all the power of vim which speeds up my workflows.
But nobody's going to do this without being a huge vim nerd, so I recognize it's not a general alternative.
Heidi is the best gui for mysql/mariadb. It's really great and I don't change it with anything when i need to work on mysql servers.
Unfortunately it's not that good on postgres or ms sql server. Feels more buggy and slow for these databases but I'm not sure if it's Heidi or the db drivers.
I'm also one of the people that used heidi on Linux with wine (along with notepad++) so a native version is more than welcome!
I have wanted to try HeidiSQL before, but the lack of Linux version stopped me. Now, that it releases a Linux version, I think it is time to try it.
Currently, I am using DbGate (daily) and DBeaver (occasionally). Feature-wise, DBeaver is better than DbGate, but it is slower than DbGate. Now let's see if Heidi is better than those two.
I like how snappy and easy HeidiSQL is, I still use it when I need to manually twiddle some bit. But it's buggy and I don't write any SQL in it as I've lost enough code mid writing. DBeaver is my daily driver now.
I only ever used DBeaver, because that seemed like the best free option for Linux to manage several SQL and NoSQL databases. What does Heidi offer that makes it better?
Heidi is the best, this is really wonderful. I had been using MeowSQL as an imitation client which was fine, but having the real HeidiSQL again is such a nice feeling.
The deb package here didn't run for me on Debian 12 nor under distrobox Ubuntu, i think the dependency list needs a little attention, but that can be easily solved.
I've missed Heidi after changing job and moving from MySQL to Mongo and then Linux many (many) years ago.
Looking forward to see how it goes with Postgres and SQLite nowadays.
Long time user of HeidiSQL here. I respect the author a lot. He's been tirelessly working on this project for many years, mostly alone. Of course, that's due to the closed nature of Delphi.
It's great news that this is now available for Linux, but the better news for me is that I can now build it on Lazarus / FreePascal. Even if it doesn't support all the features (eg MSSQL), at least I can now contribute fixes for some UI issues that have been bothering me.
I can successfully build the FreePascal version on Windows and it runs... fine. Feels a little less snappy than the Delphi version and there are some UI padding issues. But it's a massive step in the right direction.
If you can, please support this project, either financially or through code. contributions. IHMO what is dearly needed is for the different SQL dialects to be abstracted out properly. It's currently done in a bit of a crude way (no disrespect to the author) and it will require a big refactoring to get it right, but will open doors to more dialects.
Very good news that the Freepascal version compiles and works correctly also on Windows. As you said, Delphi was a huge barrier to prevent other developers to contribute, but if we can use Lazarus, Heidi can receive a lot of help not only for Linux version but also for Windows one. Probably, thanks to Freepascal / Lazarus, it can be ported easily also to Mac OS now.
> easily
Depending on how OS-independent it is, it might just be a matter of opening the project file and selecting Run -> Build (yes, the fact that Build is under Run is something that always bothered me, but it has been like that for 22+ years now). However the resulting app will be very "win-like" and when i was making macOS builds using Lazarus back when i cared about macOS i always had a "Macize" function i called at startup (ifdef'd for mac builds) that did things like replace the Ctrl modifier shortcuts with Command in menus (you can enumerate the menus, no need to do that by hand), move the About command to the apple menu, etc. There are also some other things that you may feel like doing.
TBH one thing that i wish was possible with Lazarus (at the time, now i don't care much :-P) was to be able to define different "layouts" per widgetset in a way that allowed you to use, say, a 'default' layout for Windows and Linux but a modified layout for macOS. Technically it is possible to design a form and then have another form inherit from it and apply modifications there, but it feels kinda awkward to use for different layouts (it is mainly meant for creating forms that you want to reuse but still have modifications - and it can be clunky in how it decides when to ignore changes in the base form or not - i do not use visual form inheritance, but i do use frames to design reusable controls visually and i often have to edit the source code of form files that use frames to remove overrides after saving the form so that changes to the frame are reflected in all forms that use it - this makes me want to add a readonly property to frames at some point :-P).
These days Delphi has community license for non-commercial use
Right, but having a unique codebase and one development tool for Linux, Windows and Macos (probably), would help a lot to reduce the effort to maintain the application.
Since Linux version works, I wonder if it could work on Mac, too?
HeidiSQL is free software for people who work with databases, and aims to be intuitive to use. "Heidi" lets you connect to a variety of databases, like MariaDB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Interbase and Firebird.
Since some days it is finally available in a native Linux version. The code has been ported from Delphi to FreePascal / Lazarus.
I'm curious if anyone here has any experience with DbBeaver and HeidiSQL and can make a comparison. I've been using DbBeaver for a while, but the interface is... strange. Will probably try Heidi tomorrow.
I've been using HeidiSQL since around 2008(?) at my first job. What I like the most about Heidi is the UI for generating queries and editing left/right joins in a graphical manner. So you can use it to "prototype" your queries first, try them out, see the results, and then copy/paste them into your code, which is a supernice experience, including for beginners that haven't had much experience with SQL databases and lack the "feeling" of how to decouple datasets into tables.
I was trying out DBeaver a lot, actually, but a couple of things here and there didn't work as expected. Sometimes I had problems with batch selections that I couldn't reproduce so I was then most of the time switching back to HeidiSQL in my wine sandbox when it didn't work, out of frustration.
To me it's really great to see Heidi getting revived into a community software again, I really missed the tool a lot since I've made the switch to Linux as my daily driver everywhere. Wine's double click seemless windows aren't really nice and sometimes really annoying.
Yeah, DbBeaver is a slow behemoth while HeidiSQL is like 2 MB snappy lean and mean exe.
Works great in Wine before this native version came about.
When I switched to Linux full time, I had to ditch Heidi as they didn’t have a Linux version. I actually prefer dbeaver now, Heidi had some odd defaults (default collation especially) which need attention but you don’t realise it until too late. It also was a bit crashy here and there.
DBeaver has the worst name in history but it can do everything Heidi does and doesn’t fall over every 20 minutes. The buttons are all over the place and it’s harder to navigate than Heidi but it’s also standard on a few distros.
I’m glad it has some competition though. If you’re working with sql server Microsoft have really dropped the ball with SSMS and don’t talk to me about azure data studio it is a undergraduate project that got a C.
I was switching a lot between SQLite, pawl, Marian and sql server and dbeaver is excellent on all of them
I feel like dbeaver works with all of them. It never feels like a pleasure to use, unlike Heidi, which actively feels like it makes working with databases nicer.
I've found Dbeaver struggles with large tables or databases with a lot of tables, often going out of memory unless I click the GC button every 10 seconds.
Meanwhile Heidi is fine.
> DBeaver has the worst name in history
Hey man. You take that back.
GIMP would like a word...
For me, DbBeaver is jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Seems to handle every database known to mankind, but not a fantastic user experience. While HeidiSQL is a work of art for MySQL / MariaDB, but not much else. I use & appreciate both in different ways.
I've used both; DBeaver for personal stuff, Heidi at work. Heidi has a much more intuitive interface, IMHO
With DBeaver I was able to use tnsnames.ora to use a few tricks to connect to an oracle db
It required certain host/user/cid combination to pass the whitelist.
Congrats on this. IMHO HeidiSQL is the best desktop SQL tool out there. Keep up the good work!
If you have the license for it, it is hard to beat Datagrip from Jetbrains. Support for just about any database and also integrated support for AI/Copilot making it much easier to write exploratory queries.
I used Datagrip like 10 years ago and it was amazing, back then I used some pre-release evaluation thingy, loved it, was only working with mysql though.
last year i looked at it again, in a project where mongodb is used, it did not perform so well, sure the features where there, but still mongodb is document orientated so i had to come up with workarounds and so ... yeah back to cli unfortunately
but for any relational database, I'd rather use datagrip!
For simpler use-cases I've used both https://dataflare.app/ and https://tableplus.com/ with success. They are much quicker and lighter to start-up, browse some tables and run some queries.
Free versions are generous enough for daily use as well. For example for TablePlus "The free trial is limited to 2 opened tabs, 2 opened windows, 2 advanced filters (filters are not available on the free TablePlus Windows) at a time."
DBeaver is free, quite full featured (no AI) and FLOSS.
But has a very complex and busy UI that, for whatever reason, makes it difficult/tiring for me to use.
Very emblematic of it's Java GUI roots.
You can turn off most of them.
Yeah. Some tools are used by many for a long time and get lots of features in the process...
And some tools dont...
I love TablePlus. I basically use it for everything at this point even though I have a JetBrains all prod license. Never liked DataGrip.
I suppose it has more advanced features than IntelliJ?
Because when I switched to MacOS I had to find a replacement for HeidiSQL and, to my surprise, I was able to do everything I wanted to directly from IntelliJ, which was already my main IDE.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/database-tool-window.htm...
I use the dedicated app but IntelliJ ultimate bundles datagrip into the ide too.
Thanks for Posting. I love to see Pascal Cross Platform Apps are possible.
How does this compare with DbGate (https://github.com/dbgate/dbgate)?
Heidi was the default option on our work machines a few years ago and it’s one of the buggiest pieces of software I’ve ever used.
Does it still lock up the entire UI if a query takes longer than five seconds to return results? Does it still pop up exception dialogs every ten minutes when it’s been open for longer than a few hours?
HeidiSQL has its quirks and occasional rough edges, but it's certainly simpler and more straightforward to use than DBeaver, the other common free SQL client that is sometimes recommended.
I prefer Heidi where the DB setup allows it, and use DBeaver as a backup.
Using DBeaver and its also not without problems. Lots of popup dialogs that we cannot stop. But ti does not constantly crash or lock up.
This is my exact experience with DBeaver. Absolutely cannot stop all the frustrating popups. Finally got fed up and started using vim+dadbod and while the experience is a bit less batteries-included, I was mostly just using DBeaver to run raw SQL anyway, and have been on vim for over a decade so that's an option for me. Now my SQL queries live in per-project versioned files instead of some eclipse project folder somewhere and I can edit them with all the power of vim which speeds up my workflows.
But nobody's going to do this without being a huge vim nerd, so I recognize it's not a general alternative.
Heidi is the best gui for mysql/mariadb. It's really great and I don't change it with anything when i need to work on mysql servers.
Unfortunately it's not that good on postgres or ms sql server. Feels more buggy and slow for these databases but I'm not sure if it's Heidi or the db drivers.
I'm also one of the people that used heidi on Linux with wine (along with notepad++) so a native version is more than welcome!
I have wanted to try HeidiSQL before, but the lack of Linux version stopped me. Now, that it releases a Linux version, I think it is time to try it. Currently, I am using DbGate (daily) and DBeaver (occasionally). Feature-wise, DBeaver is better than DbGate, but it is slower than DbGate. Now let's see if Heidi is better than those two.
HeidiSQL, CudaText, Double Commander -- these native Pascal Apps still give the best user experience for me after decades.
There is also Peazip : https://github.com/peazip/PeaZip
I like how snappy and easy HeidiSQL is, I still use it when I need to manually twiddle some bit. But it's buggy and I don't write any SQL in it as I've lost enough code mid writing. DBeaver is my daily driver now.
This is one of those programs that are so good and feature-rich that, even though I use Linux full time, I installed Wine to use the Windows version.
No other Linux program has anywhere near half the features of HeidiSQL. Saying this is great news is an understatement.
I only ever used DBeaver, because that seemed like the best free option for Linux to manage several SQL and NoSQL databases. What does Heidi offer that makes it better?
Heidi is the best, this is really wonderful. I had been using MeowSQL as an imitation client which was fine, but having the real HeidiSQL again is such a nice feeling.
The deb package here didn't run for me on Debian 12 nor under distrobox Ubuntu, i think the dependency list needs a little attention, but that can be easily solved.
Heidi is one of the apps that I like so much it locked me to using windows
I use Heidi SQL daily but then again if I had to do anything major I would return to MS SQL management studio. Heidi can be buggy at times.
Great news. For me HeidiSQL has been one of my daily dev tools (since 2012?). I don't find it buggy, it's really fast and does the job really well.
Great news!
I've missed Heidi after changing job and moving from MySQL to Mongo and then Linux many (many) years ago. Looking forward to see how it goes with Postgres and SQLite nowadays.
HeidiSQL really brings me to back old school private servers for various games
Very, very cool.
Pretty great program for Windows.
[flagged]