Today I’m excited to kickstart our Slashbase journal. This post also marks as the beginning of Slashbase Journal and I am writing this post as I have more clarity on the whats and whys of this project.
What am I building?
Slashbase is a modern in-browser collaborative database IDE for modern dev and data teams. Use Slashbase to connect to your databases, browse & manage data or schema, write, run, and share queries with your team, right from the comfort of your browser. As of today, it supports PostgreSQL and MongoDB, but more database supports are on our roadmap.
Some of the features included but not limited to are:
- 🧑💻 Browser & Desktop App: Use as IDE in your browser or as desktop app.
- 🪄 Modern Interface: With a modern interface, it is easy to use.
- 👥 Collaborative: Works great with your teams.
- ⚡️ Quick Browse: Quickly filter, sort & browse data and schema with a low-code UI.
- 💾 Save Queries: Write & Save queries to re-run in future. Easy to share saved queries within teams.
- 📊 Create Charts: Create charts from your query results.
- 🗂 Projects: Organise all database connections into various projects & members.
- 🔐 Manage permissions: Manage your team member’s read-write access to databases.
- 📕 Query Cheatsheets: Search for query commands right inside IDE, no need to search online when you forget query syntax.
- ✅ Database Support: PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
Why am I building it?
A series of thoughts about the future of IDEs and building better developer experiences led me to start building this tool. It also started because I needed a tool like this for myself, something that works in my browser.
I started building it and started using it myself. At this point, I could only see the value such a tool will bring to me personally as a developer. Countless ideas started running inside my head for creating a better experience for database management, but those were some other day. I had put it up on GitHub and to my surprise one fine day I woke up to 300+ stars. This happened on an old repository which I deleted sometime later, and lost all those stars.
Few days later, I thought of putting it back on GitHub again and launching it on hacker news to see if there is enough interest in the tool. It was up-voted by the good folks on hacker news, it made it to the front-page for some time and got to 300+ stars again. As of today, it is at 500+ stars and I am starting to build this as a dev-tools startup.
Honestly, I am very excited about putting those countless thoughts to work and ultimately build a great developer experience with the help of our community.
A little about our business
Slashbase is exploring an open-core model. If you are unaware of what open-core is, as described on Wikipedia, “the open-core model primarily involves offering a ‘core’ or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering ‘commercial’ versions or add-ons as proprietary software.”
Our core query engine is open-sourced on GitHub and powers locally running open-source Slashbase CLI version and the same query engine is also used in Slashbase Cloud version.
To be more clear, Slashbase will be free for individuals developers and data folks who are using it to connect to databases locally. If you are an individual and want to try out Slashbase, you can do so by following our install guide. Slashbase Cloud is in private beta and now available as early access to invited teams only. Sign up for early access.
So, I welcome you to our journal. Expect to read about our thoughts and stories here. We will also use it to share some learning resources around databases. Do subscribe to our newsletter, if you are interested in getting new posts as soon as we write one.
