Any Supported GUI database administrators for MariaDB? Issues to consider with Community Builds? Snap or Flatpak?

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.

I’m not totally sure if it’s what you want. However, have you tried phpMyAdmin ?

I want a native local app, not a web app. So something like MySQL workbench or dBeaver. The main reason is that I will be using it to connect both to local and remote databases over an SSH tunnel. phpMyAdmin can do this but in my experience the configuration is a bit glitchier and performance with remote connections isn’t as reliable. I already have the SSH tunnel set up which is the hard part of using one of the native local apps for a remote connection, hence my favoring those.

Also I am just not crazy about the interface of phpMyAdmin and prefer those other two tools.

I’m confused about what you are talking about.

How are you willing to help DBeaver being packaged to openSUSE?

A simple OBS search would lighten you up. There are 16 different home projects/projects for DBeaver. Some are broken, some are building.

I already did this before posting this question, and I found these builds. Furthermore I already narrowed down to which ones build successfully on Leap 15.6, and among these, which ones build with the current version, there are I think 5 such ones.

My questions are:

What kind of risks are there installing a community build like these? How can I research / verify them?

As I said above, my concern is less the stability of the app, and more security. I don’t want to install anything with a substantial risk of containing malicious code. But I don’t care if the app occasionally crashes or glitches.

Why not get it directly from the developers? Have you looked at:
https://dbeaver.io/download/
They offer an RPM package as well as both snap and flatpak packages. For openSUSE I would suggest trying the RPM package, and if that doesn’t work use the flatpak package.

I’m a little unclear about the difference between the community builds, and the RPM package from the developer.

Am I correct in understanding that the community builds are compiled and linked to the versions of libraries in the corresponding release of OpenSUSE, in my case, Leap 15.6, whereas the RPM package may be linked against different library versions and thus may require installation of more software, thus introducing some bloat into the system? But…the RPM handles dependency issues so it is not truly a standalone binary package the way a flatpak or snap is, so it would not be as bloated as a flatpak?

Or am I not understanding this correctly?

I still haven’t had my answers about the security of community builds answered, I am really curious about that. Do others here use community builds? And if so, how do you assess whether or not you can trust them?

All the possible risks regarding software.

You can check if the code was changed or patched, as far as I could see OBS doesn’t download the source code to be compiled. Once you complete this, you question would turn to: how can I trust the developers?
Beyond this point, you might learn how to become a Software Security Reseacher.

Finally, DBeaver is a plugin to Eclipse. You can just download the tar.gz from the developers [1], extract and run.

1- Download | DBeaver Community

1 Like

I know you do not like flatpaks, but I highly recommend to test dbgate. It is imho the best opensource database gui.

1 Like

Thanks everyone. I decided to go with the dBeaver flatpak. Not my ideal solution but it works. I tried one of the community builds but apparently the user hadn’t properly worked out all the dependencies and it would have required installing a newer version of the JVM that is not in Leap 15.6, so flatpak it is.

I’m a bit curious why dBeaver is seen as sufficiently niche that it isn’t included in the default distro. It’s not only true of OpenSUSE but of most linux distros, that it’s not an officially supported package.

And there isn’t really an alternative among supported packages. Using it as an Eclipse plugin doesn’t make sense because I don’t use or need Eclipse, that’s a big complex package that I don’t want or need to install.

DbGate looks intriguing (might even be better?), but I don’t know it and I know dBeaver, and also, it isn’t officially supported. If something were officially supported that might tip the scales towards me actually trying out something new.

Are there really that few people out there using tools like this? I’ve always thought of a db administrator app as a pretty fundamental thing that is one of the first pieces of software I install when getting a new office setup going. Am I the weirdo out here?

I simply downloaded dbeaver-ce (v23 and v24) and installed on openSUSE 15.4 and Slowroll using : zypper in dbeaver-ce-24.0.2-stable.x86_64.rpm
It works without the need of snap / flatpak …

I don’t use openSUSE 15.6 (at the moment) but I can confirm that v 23.0.0 works on openSUSE 15.4 and v 24.0.2 works on Slowroll (just rpm not snap/flatpak).
I did not try other versions so I cannot speak about last version (v 24.1.5) …

Both tarball and rpm of version 24.1.5 from dbeaver.io works in Leap 15.6.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.