Valentina Studio - a free program for working with DBMS

Many developers believe that the best interface for working with databases is the text-based console interface. I personally have not yet achieved such enlightenment, so I trust GUI tools more. Well, if a DBMS like Postgres has its own utility for working with a database, what should I do if not? Or if you need to work with different databases at the same time? Under Windows, alternative clients to various DBMSs are a sea of ​​spills. With other OSs (I currently work in OS X), everything is not so rosy, although there are programs of varying degrees of suitability and convenience. I used to use Navicat, but recently I found another interesting solution that I want to talk about: Valentina Studio .

I must say right away that I talked with the developers, and I really like their concept, what they do and how, so I decided to just write a review about a good tool that few people know about, since the program was publicly released very recently. Before that, it was developed for a long time for Valentina DB, and only in February a version was released with support for well-known popular databases. At the same time, the developers made a fairly reasonable decision - the basic version is completely free, and they take money only for a few powerful "especially professional" functions that you can most often do without.

Valentina Studio supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and its own ValentinaDB database (yes, these developers create their own DBMS, which is very, very interesting, but this is a separate conversation).



The first thing that pleases is that the program has a “native” interface on each platform (if I'm not mistaken, this is a merit of wxWidgets, but in the distant future it will be ported to Qt), I don’t know how anyone, but it impresses me. Plus - the native application is clearly faster than Java.

The program interface is built around tabs: you can open them as many as you like for different tasks, and quickly switch between them. By default, a bookmark opens with the interface for connecting to existing ones and creating new databases.



In general, the “studio” has all the necessary tools that you expect to see in the program. Creation of new tables, views, triggers and other database entities, their editing and deletion. Everywhere with these operations, you can see what SQL queries are used for this, which is convenient for SQL learners. But there are also unusual moments, for example, the presence of several different ways to view database objects. In addition to the familiar representation of database entities in the form of a tree in other programs, there is also a multi-column view resembling Finder OS X. In this case, you can select several entities at the same time (for example, several fields of the table) and see their general properties.

Of course, there is also an SQL query editor with syntax highlighting and auto-completion, and a data editor in the database with filters, sorting and other necessary things. In the editor, support for subordinate tables is very cool if relations are configured in the database.



There are also tools for working with the database server: user and database management on the server, diagnostics, reindexing and defragmentation.

Good built-in chart editor. In the free version, it even allows you to reverse engineer the existing database, which helps to understand what happens in the case of a confused database structure (usually this is not in free programs). True, the reverse operation of creating / updating the database according to the diagram is already available only in the full version.



Also, the full version adds a full-fledged visual report editor, database synchronization functions with SQL DIFF and ODBC support. By the way, reports from Valentina are a subject of a separate discussion, like their database, because their capabilities are very rich. In fact, it is cross-platform: Win, Linux and OS X report engine (by the way, also a rarity in fact) with a visual editor and the ability to use it as a built-in component.



The good thing about free software is that you can always try it fully to understand how it suits you. I really came up :). You can download the program from the developers site , OS X users can use the Mac App Store(by the way, in the US the program takes 8th place in the top of the free programs in the development section)

There is also a “ten-minute introduction video” in which some features are shown in more detail.



PS I am glad that the project is developing dynamically, several shortcomings I noticed were taken into work and corrected literally in a matter of days.

PPS Developers asked for registration information in English when registering.