Start time is not a great measure of overall performance. Also you are comparing two very different types of applications.

A text editor that can be extended vs a platform application is the same argument we've been having about vim vs emacs for years.

DBeaver is an incredibly powerful application that had allowed me to work in Postgres, Teradata, and Oracle databases for years. Could I do the same kind of work in VSCode? Absolutely not, unless I wanted to build out an entirely new interface on top of VSCode. By the time that work is done it could be equally slow to start up. DBeaver has an absolutely massive feature set tailored for database work and it has to load all those plugins at some point.

Another counter point is VSCode with java-lsp could never handle the 300k loc code base we developed on, where intelij and eclipse do just fine. Yes, they startup slowly, but at least they provided meaningful and fast autocomplete without the need to wait for the language sever or VScode to unfreeze.

Again these are purely anecdote, but please don't purely judge an application by it's startup time if it saves you time in the end.

One thing I've noticed is I don't care about start time if I'm going to be in one app for several hours, but if I'm doing a lot of switching between apps, without one app taking my primary focus, I become very sensitive to start-up time.

I also think the optimizations for high performance with a relatively small amount of data are fundamentally different than the optimizations for high performance with a very large amount of data, I have not really seen any GUI approach that scales smoothly from small amounts of data to large amounts of data without some complexity on the back-end

I talked about speed not usefulness or features since parent said:

> There are lots of fast, usable JVM gui applications.

I used VSCode as an example because it's touted as the fastest electron app.

Now I have no idea how to benchmark DBeaver once it's running but since my use case is to launch it once in while to run a quick SQL query, startup time is important for me.

For years I have said I need a kind of SQL pad: a native app, that launches ultra fast, directly shows me the tables once connected (hide all the complexity of the DB) and let me run some SQL immediately. I guess I'll probably have to scratch my own itch once I find the time.

I recently came across Beekeeper Studio in a comment here on hn, and I really like it so far.

I generally use pgcli for talking to postgres, and I occasionally need sql developer for Oracle - but with Bk i might standardize on it for ms sql server, postgres and sqlite.

It's foss and electron. That it's snappier than sql developerto start isn't saying much... I guess.

https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/

https://github.com/beekeeper-studio/beekeeper-studio

https://www.pgcli.com/

I tried ms azure data studio or what it's called, and I think Beekeeper is a good alternative. It doesn't do all that sql server mgmt studio does - but then it also doesn't need to run in a windows vm..

> I recently came across Beekeeper Studio in a comment here on hn

me too :) I installed it but didn't connect to any DB yet. Startup time is certainly no better than DBeaver though.

A co-worker that lived in his terminal used jsqsh[1] for simple queries to an Oracle DB when he did not need DBeaver. Jsqsh appears to no longer be maintained and I'm not quite sure how fast it is, but it still might be worth looking into. There is also usql[2] that you might be able to build something on top of.

[1]https://github.com/scgray/jsqsh [2]https://github.com/xo/usql

Table Plus has native versions for macOs and windows https://tableplus.com/