Microscope - the most ergonomic database viewer / editor

[kindred bough]

I've long been frustrated with the state of database editors. Tools like DBeaver, Beekeeper, DB Browser for SQLite, and pgAdmin all felt clunky and outdated. Using a modern database viewer should feel more like working in VS Code - intuitive, extensible, and built for productivity.

Instead, most tools still feel stuck in the '90s: single connections, rigid interfaces, and almost no support for plugins or community-driven improvements.

The breaking point for me came while building trading strategies and needing to inspect dozens of .parquet files. DBeaver made me open each file manually, and even then the results were often unreliable.

So I built my own.

The first version was built with Electron - but a 768MB binary was a dealbreaker. I quickly switched to Tauri, rebuilt everything in under a week, and haven’t looked back.

https://zarrasvand.com/microscope

[solemn dust]

If it supports all that Beekeeper supports, I'll switch.

[kindred bough]

@solemn dust If you tell me what you want, it likely will.

What is the features you look for?

[solemn dust]

Mostly databases (Mongo, Scylla,...), and couldn't find an option to import or export databases

[kindred bough]

I'll see what I can do, Scylla is just Cassandra in terms of protocol.

I'll add a piece on the website about features that are going to be worked on in a few days, to help you track / shout and we'll take it from there.

Is weird that we don't have better database tooling in 2025, but fortunatly we'll change that now.

[azure stump]

Looking forward to a mac version (I have intel personally)

[kindred bough]

@azure stump is ready for you: curl -fsSL https://zarrasvand.com/install_microscope.sh | sh

[azure stump]

Just a note that it requires email. Not sure why that's needed. Also could use more instructions. What is a data directory?

Update: looks like a data directory is just a folder that may contain multiple CSV documents (supposing it detects Sqlite as well(

[kindred bough]

@azure stump or parquet files, or sqlite, correct, next version in the works - lots of improvements coming. 100% agree.

1. I need to make a list of upcoming upgrades, so you can fill in the feedback not already covered.

2. It doesn't collect any data or anything, not even crash analytics. And upgrads will be changed from the app downloading a binary to you seeing a message and running another sh script manually (1 liner again). That way, you won't worry about binaries being pushed to you.

3. The email will help me in the future correlate the same user across multiple devices. That's all. Not sold, not forwarded, etc.

[azure stump]

What if a person uses another persons email?

[kindred bough]

Nothing can happen, when that feature is in place, you will need to confirm your email to get access to previous sessions.

I started my career as security engineer and application security architect for banks in London.

Keep coming with the questions though, super useful, and I'm sure you catch me on something, just not this 🫡

@azure stump One more thing, for now, nothing about your sessions is stored, not even locally, the email is just a bit ahead of its time, features I hoped to finish but then release prior 🙂

[signal crystal]

2. Don't have an Apple developer account?

[kindred bough]

Nope - refusing to pay them to release a free tool. That's just bonkers. They should have a tier for free tools with no in-app purchase to get signed without it. They don't and that's why all the free software either sucks or isn't truly free these days.

Should release new version end of this week.

[rocky gazelle]

looks a lot like Cloudflare's UI, which I like, perfect blend of usefulness

if you're serious about the app I can help you get the mac versions signed, I have an Apple account for https://github.com/rclone-ui/rclone-ui

[eager wren]

Hey, it looks very nice. For your parquet files do you support all column types ? My current parquet viewer does not support columns such as List[Array]

[kindred bough]

Hey, don't know, got a file I can test on?

There are major upgrades. I should release it soon. Been dragging my feets and bloating the release.

That said, tauri is such a bliss, thank you so much to the maintainers.

[kindred bough]

Will keep it unsigned for now.

[eager wren]

Here you have

[kindred bough]

Doesn't seem like it.

Are these fields common in Parquet files?

[eager wren]

Thanks for the test. I don't think it's that common, usually it's more flat

[kindred bough]

But are they part of the parquet file spec?

Reason for asking, under the hood, this is duckdb doing the heavy lifting. DuckDB has parquet reading, sqlite reading, csv etc. And I never seen it bug out like this. I wonder if this standard parquet.

If it is, I might file a feature request...

[eager wren]

As far as I know it's a standard type, it's listed in the types in the apache parquet repository
https://github.com/apache/parquet-format/blob/master/LogicalTypes.md#lists

duckdb might not support it because it's not widely used and it's not easy to display list

anyway, I think I'll use Miscroscope, it'll help me instead of having 2 different programs to view sqlite and parquet

[kindred bough]

Current online version has some bugs, will ship the update faster for your sake 🙂

Yeah, for me personally, it's a pita to use anything. Like with sqlite files, I hate that you have to constantly open the file browser to load a new sqlite database, rather than just clicking on another file in the same folder in the explorer...

DB tools are in the 90s still.

[eager wren]

Thanks ! Right now I use sqlitestudio and ParquetViewer, they work but it feels old

[kindred bough]

For now, there is no editing - read only mode only. Does that suffice?

Read, i.e. query.

[eager wren]

Read and write is obviously better, but just with read it's nice. I don't edit a lot my sqlite db but I can do it with RustRover if I need to

[kindred bough]

Given you're a real user, I'll take your feedback post the coming release and see what I can implement for you. This all started as I do a lot of stock screening and analysis and all of the trading data is in parquet files...so...

A friend says: "Ignore other formats, just do parquet, csv and sqlite read and search/query, not for db management. Feature bloat".

I felt he has good point, hence the direction. He too is a real user.

[eager wren]

Thanks!

[wicked geyser]

This is real neat. Is it possible to run it web based without tauri? Could be a real contender

[kindred bough]

Hey, about to push the updated version.

No, it doesn't run on web, or the file size would be quite limited. What is wrong with the downloadable version?

Browsers just have much less process memory available to process large files :/

[kindred bough]

New version releasing this week. Just need to do some further testing and write release notes.

[kindred bough]

Released.
Notes and download here: https://zarrasvand.com/microscope

Created a new thread for this v1 release.