Show HN: Outerbase Studio – Open-Source Database GUI

It seems odd that there is nothing like Access (or the other couple if similar DB tools that were around in the heyday of Access and before), but I think it is because the demand is relatively small. I've seen several projects start in that direction then pivot elsewhere or just die an unsupported death.

I think the problem is that demand/interest is not sufficient to keep a self-hosted project going, nor monetisable enough for a hosted one. People wanting to self-host end up going with something more specific, possibly self-made, for their needs, rather than a generic solution, and a hosted solution has a couple of significant costs to cover:

1. Resource use when people load a large amount of data then run under-optimised queries on it (or impossible to optimise, if they've chosen a bad structure for what they want out of the data). This can be mitigated by throttling individual users' IO/memory/CPU use but then the product gets a reputation for being slow.

2. The support that many people will expect (especially if they are paying, but even if they are not) which could consume a lot of time. A project that is very lucky might end up with a community that takes on a good amount of this load, but you can't bank on being that lucky.

3. Resource to keep available all the hardly used, or even never used, projects that will sit around if the service is free. Mitigating this with cold storage will help, but as with throttling active use this will make the service appear slow generally (people will remember the tens-of-seconds startup time more than they will notice subsequent actions being more than fast enough).

Getting people to pay will be an uphill struggle, and money from advertising is unlikely to cover the above, especially with many people like me blocking commercial stalking which also blocks a lot of advertising.

The large ints thing is because people forget that numerics in Javascript are all officially floating point. The optimisers might often see that they can use real integers for performance, but you can't depend on that so have to assume it isn't happening.

Integer numbers are accurate up to 2^53-1 (and down to -2^53) as the IEEE754 double precision type is used, which is sufficient for a majority of tasks, but obviously not all.

Native BigInt (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...) is widely supported these days (has been since late 2020 IIRC, or early 2023 if you waited for LTS releases without the feature to reach EOL) but is not yet widely used (many don't seem to know it is there, or assume it isn't widely supported, or are concerned about performance). Performance isn't usually bad (about 60% or the basis Number type last time I compared) but there are other issues with JSON or with many libraries only supporting Number not BigInt.

How about LibreOffice Base?

Appreciate the kind words! Will dig into performance and see what we can do to further optimize it!

We could definitely do something like that, question for you if you've used any sort of AI -> SQL generator do you think it replaces the need for something like a visual builder? Or is it still nice to be able to construct them with visual blocks?