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About Beekeeper Studio

Why we decided to build an open source SQL editor, who we are, and where we came from.

Beekeeper Studio is built and maintained by Matthew Rathbone in Dallas, TX.

Beekeeper Studio is built with Vue.js, a lovely little web framework that is similar to React and Angular, but a little smaller and easier to work with (personal opinion, no hate mail please).

Origin Story

I'm not a DBA or a server administrator, but I build software for a living, so I have to interact with databases on a daily basis.

I got frustrated that there wasn't a straightforward and approachable cross-platform SQL client I could use. Sure there are lots of java-powered tools aimed at power-users with a million buttons and tabs, but they're not pleasent to use. I loved Sequel Pro on MacOS, but that's no good when working on Linux, or with SQLite, Postgres, or SQL Server.

So in 2019 I started working on Beekeeper Studio. It took almost a year of (skant) evening and weekend time to launch the first version in early 2020.

Screenshot from the first month after launch (May 2020). Lets see how well this ages!

Why Call it Beekeeper?

While I love getting tweets from folks disappointed we're not running an analytics company for actual Beekeepers, the app is called Beekeeper for a reason.

Over the last 10 years I have built four apps named Beekeeper. Two were internal tools at Foursquare, and one was a (now defunkt) company, Beekeeper Data. The first app was originally called Beekeeper because it interacted with Apache Hive (yes the product name is a dad-joke), but I became so fond of the name that I just can't stop naming products *Beekeeper*.

Screenshot of the original Beekeeper from a (public) Foursquare presentation  in 2011.

More About Matthew

Matthew is an independant data analytics software consultant. He works with data tools like Spark, Hadoop, Ansible, and AWS, alongside building user-facing software products. Matthew is a proud father of 2 and husband to Alexandra Pavlakis.

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