7 Powerful DBeaver Tips and Tricks to Improve Your SQL Workflow
Straight-to-the-point tips for the best SQL IDE The post 7 Powerful DBeaver Tips and Tricks to Improve Your SQL Workflow appeared first on Towards Data Science.
DBeaver is the most powerful open-source SQL IDE, but there are several features people don’t know about. In this post, I will share with you several features to speed up your workflow, with zero fluff.
I’ve learned these as I’m currently digging deeper into the tools I use daily, starting with Dbeaver. In a future post, I’ll compare the workflow between DBeaver versus building your SQL development environment on VSCode (or Cursor). If you’re interested in that, be sure to follow my publications!
Today, though, the focus is on learning the cool features of DBeaver. Let’s get started.
The Command Palette
This is one of the most powerful yet hidden features in DBeaver. Maybe people overlook it because it’s not called a “Command Palette”. You can open it with CMD + 3 (Mac) or CTRL + 3 (Windows).
From here, you can access basically any action in the IDE. I mostly use it for:
- Switching between Sql scripts.
- Navigating to specific settings.
- Quickly accessing actions like Export Results, Refresh Schema, Open Templates, Rename File, etc.
(Officially, this feature in DBeaver is called “Find Actions.”)
Custom SQL formatter
Did you know you can easily set up a different formatter in DBeaver? I’m personally not a fan of the default formatting, and since I mainly use PostgreSQL, I prefer pg_formatter.
Let me show you how it works to set up pg_formatter, but keep in mind that the process will be similar for any SQL formatter that you can call via the terminal.
# Install PG Formatter
brew install pgformatter
# Find where the program is located.
# In my case: opt/homebrew/bin/pg_format
which pg_formatNext, go to Preferences → Editors → SQL Editor → Formatting, select an “External Formatter,” and then paste the path to your desired formatter.
