Ducklet 1.0.1
Ducklet makes using SQLite databases easy for everyone, whether you’re a developer, data analyst, or just curious. We’ve designed a user-friendly interface for a smooth and intuitive experience, so you can focus on your data.
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Experience unmatched performance and seamless integration with our native application written in SwiftUI and AppKit.
I discovered this new app while assembling the Black Friday deals. It brings some fresh ideas but isn’t mature enough for me to switch yet.
Likes:
- It has a nice view of how much space each table and index is using.
- You can open each table’s schema in a separate window.
- It has tabs both to show different sequences of SQL that you’re editing/executing and to show query results. So there’s a lot of history visible.
- It can show the
EXPLAINinfo about how a query is executed.
Dislikes:
- It takes too many steps to create a project and add my database. I just want to drag and drop a file to open it.
- There are lots of places in the table views and statistics list where text is truncated, and there’s no way to resize things to show it, even though there’s lots of available space in the window.
- There are lots of places where text isn’t selectable.
- The table browser (when you’re not doing a query) is in a sheet that feels constricting and can’t show the full cell values.
- It takes extra steps to view a BLOB, and it doesn’t know how to decode common formats.
Overall, I like Base and Core Data Lab better, but Base has been giving me a lot of internal errors lately, and I’m unsure whether it’s still under development. However, Ducklet looks promising, so I purchased it on sale.
Previously:
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Hi, I'm the developer of Base. For a while I fell behind on keeping Base up to date, but I am working on it again now.
Ducklet is cool though.
I'm a curious person and I like to peeks into the various app databases that reside on my drive. One tool I use for that is DB Browser for SQLite. It's free, open source and does what I need it to do. Unfortunately it's hardly maintained and rarely updated.
I took advantage of the sale and played with Ducklet a bit and share your early criticism. I hope that I won't regret the purchase though. On the homepage they state that they plan to release a paid upgrade every 12 to 18 months. For a tool that I only need occasionally that would be very expensive.
It has been my observation that these niche developer tools don't fare very well on the App Store. Over the years I probably bought around a dozen of them and most have been abandoned by the creator after a short amount of time (1-2 years after first release).
@Ben Glad to hear that you’re working on the next version of Base!
I would also recommend checking out TablePlus (https://tableplus.com/). It's free for basic use (limited to two tabs at once).
It's just an all round excellent app and I find it invaluable for inspecting our app's sqlite databases.
In Ducklet I couldn't find a way to display the row_id, which isn't always sequential and is often used as a key.