Sqliteman

A developer’s and administrator’s tool for SQLite databases, built with Qt6.

Sqliteman opens SQLite files, runs SQL against them, shows and edits their rows, and does what SQLite itself makes awkward — altering a table, for one. It talks to SQLite through its C API, on a thread of its own, so a long query never freezes the window. It is free software under the GPL, version 3 or later.

The main window: the database browser, a SQL editor and its results

Who it is for

The ideal user is a developer whose program keeps its data in SQLite, or whoever looks after such a database: someone who writes and tunes SQL, manages tables, views, indexes and triggers, and keeps an eye on the file’s space and statistics. Sqliteman is not a form designer, a report tool or a spreadsheet; it is the shell’s sqlite3 with a window around it, and everything that the shell leaves to you done for you.

History

Sqliteman started in 2007, from Igor Khanin’s LiteMan, as a Qt 4 application. It grew a schema browser, a SQL editor, a data grid, the Alter Table dialog SQLite lacks, a populator and import, and was packaged for most Linux distributions, Windows and macOS. Then it stood still for years, while Qt and SQLite moved on.

Version 2 is a rewrite. It keeps what Sqliteman was for and what its dialogs did, and takes its architecture from Slonisko, a PostgreSQL client by the same author: Qt 6, the SQLite C API instead of Qt’s SQL module, everything asynchronous, and tests for nearly all of it. Two features are gone: the Constraint Triggers dialog, as SQLite enforces foreign keys itself since 3.6.19, and the translations, which would have described a program that no longer exists. They are welcome back.

Changelog

What changed in each version is written up with its release on GitHub: github.com/pvanek/sqliteman/releases. Help → About Sqliteman tells which version is running and which SQLite it uses. For changes not released yet, see the commit history.

Author and credits

Sqliteman is written by Petr Vanek, in Czechia, with the help of its contributors over the years: Igor Khanin, whose LiteMan it began from; Kamil Les for quality assurance; the translators of version 1 — Joerg Bernau, Brice Maron, Francesco De Marchi, Kamil Les and D. Yu. Usachov; and everyone who sent a patch or an issue. The logo and the program’s icon are by Anouk Voogt.

Bugs and ideas are best reported as issues on GitHub, where others can find them too. Anything else goes to petr@yarpen.cz. More about the author is on yarpen.cz.