I am looking for a GUI database administration tool that is compatible with MariaDB, something like MySQL Workbench, or dBeaver, to install on Leap 15.6. MySQL Workbench isn’t fully compatible with MariaDB and I’d rather not use it for that reason, also it’s not officially supported in OpenSUSE. dBeaver has good compatibility and I’ve had great experiences using it on other systems, but I’m a bit wary of installing packages that don’t even have experimental support in OpenSUSE. I see that there are a number of community maintained packages but I’m a little unsure about how to trust these packages.
So I guess I’d like some feedback here…one, is there an officially supported graphical client that you’d recommend? I don’t know if there is even a single app supporting this. (If there isn’t, I’d be curious why dBeaver hasn’t been integrated into the official support, as having one such GUI seems important, and dBeaver in my experience has been the best I’ve been able to find in recent years.) The only tool I see that is officially supported is PgAdmin, which is a great tool, but this is postgres-specific.
And if there aren’t any good options available, do you have a recommendation about how I could vet / research the community maintained packages for dBeaver, to determine if they are safe to install?
Because dBeaver is just an app, not a library or OS component that other aspects of my system will interact with, stability is less of an issue. I.e. if it crashes, that’s not a huge issue. I am more concerned about trusting these packages from a security standpoint, i.e. I will not somehow compromise my system by installing. I also am a little unclear, if there are 7 or so different community builds that all have the latest version, is there any difference of which one might be better? I’m a little confused as to why there would be so many different builds.
The last option which I would rather avoid is using snap or flatpak. The whole reason I migrated to OpenSUSE was that I had been using Ubuntu and the maintainers were moving more and more aspects of the system into snaps. Not just virtually all large applications, but many more fundamental components of the OS too. There are a lot of reasons I dislike snap and flatpak, not the least of which is bloat. But for a small package like dBeaver, if there are security issues with an unofficial package, I could see the pros and cons favoring tolerating something like a flatpak just this one package, because the flatpak would be an official one from the maintainers of dBeaver. On the other hand, I also think it’s a bit naive to assume that snaps or flatpaks are inherently more secure so I wonder if this is trading a downside for a “fake” benefit that isn’t really present at all?
I’d be curious people’s thoughts on these issues, if anyone could help me to know how to make a decision here.