Beekeeper Studio 5.0 Beta Release

November 4, 2024 By Matthew Rathbone

Wow, a big day for Beekeeper Studio! Our first 5.x release, and our first beta channel release.

The Beekeeper Studio team has been working since May on a massive refactor of the Beekeeper Studio application to improve security and package compatibility, the culmination of those months of work is the 5.0 release.

This release doesn’t just contain technical improvements though, there are a lot of changes and improvements to the app.

Please help us test the 5.0-beta

This is new for us, but the beta version of the app will allow us to isolate and mitigate any problems before we push the app into general availability.

You can download Beekeeper Studio 5.0 Beta here

Highlights

100% of Beekeeper Studio is now either open source, or source available

Previously we had two versions of Beekeeper Studio - the Community Edition, and the Ultimate Edition. Now we just have one app, it’s just called Beekeeper Studio. All the code is in our GitHub repository

Back in the olden times of 2022 I launched the Ultimate edition as a separate app because it was an easy way for me to see if paid features would help make the business sustainable.

The experiment was a great success, and thousands of developers have purchased an ultimate edition license (thank you if you are one of them!).

However forking the app into two editions introduced many problems:

Managing the development of two separate editions was hard and caused bugs.
Having two editions was confusing to a lot of people.
Moving between editions was really difficult for end users.

Whichever version of Beekeeper Studio you are on, you’ll get upgraded to the new Unified version once 5.0 is released.

View any database record in JSON

Introducing the JSON Detail View that shows selected database table record in JSON format.

JSON view for database records

The JSON Detail View also provides some quality of life features like an in-line foreign key data viewer, and a persistent field search.

Together this makes it much easier to scan and process very wide, or very complex data.

Connect To ClickHouse

An often-requested feature is ClickHouse compatibility. We’re happy to introduce this for v5 of Beekeeper Studio.

Most Beekeeper Studio features are supported by the ClickHouse driver, so enjoy features like the JSON Detail View right away.

Amazon IAM Authentication for PostgreSQL and Aurora on Amazon RDS

Many users have Amazon hosted databases with credentials tied to specific IAM profiles. Previously these were impossible to connect-to using Beekeeper Studio, but V5 provides the ability to use IAM credentials using a credentials file.

This feature is in Beta, but we’ll also be bringing it to MySQL and Redshift in the coming weeks.

Major performance improvements

As part of hardening the application we moved database operations to a dedicated utility process. This frees up the renderer process (the UI JavaScript) for UI-only tasks, which makes the app feel 5x faster in many places.

This was a huge undertaking, but the result is a faster, more secure, and more extensible Beekeeper Studio.

Important Support Changes in 5.0+ releases

This release removes support for any Linux distribution bundled with GLIBC < 2.28. Notably this includes Debian Buster and Ubuntu 18.04.
Oracle have transitioned to a ‘slim’ client. It’s possible some Oracle connection settings no longer work. If you encounter this, please submit a bug report.

Other features and notable changes

DEB and Snap packages are now supported for everyone
We upgraded Electron to v31 (all the way from v18)
Removed minimal mode, because it wasn’t very good and kept breaking the app for folks by mistake
No more native titlebars, these were totally busted in Electron 30+, so we’re using our client-side menus only on Linux and Windows
Imports use streams rather than reading everything into memory (where possible)
Upgraded NodeJS to v20 to align with Electron
SSH tunnel fixes
Loads of minor bugfixes

Merged Pull Requests