// the find
tpope/vim-dadbod
dadbod.vim: Modern database interface for Vim
vim-dadbod is Tim Pope's minimalist database client for Vim, built around a single :DB command that takes a connection URL and either opens an interactive REPL or runs a query with results in a preview window. It's for Vim users who want to run ad-hoc queries without leaving the editor, not people who want a full SQL IDE.
URL-based connections replace the old dbext-style 14-prompt setup, and the same :DB command handles postgres, mysql, sqlite, mongodb, redis, snowflake, and a dozen other backends through a common adapter interface. Adapters are just thin wrappers around each database's own CLI (psql, redis-cli, etc.), so behavior stays predictable and adding a new backend is a small autoload file. Per-project connection config (via a buffer-local or directory-scoped variable) means you're not stuck editing global settings or per-file modelines when switching between projects.
It shells out to native client binaries, so you need psql, mysql, mongosh, etc. actually installed and on PATH — the plugin does nothing to help with that. There's no query history, no schema-aware autocomplete, and no persistent results pane; each query just dumps into a fresh preview window, so anything beyond one-off exploration means pairing it with vim-dadbod-completion and vim-dadbod-ui, which are separate plugins with their own version drift risk. Being Vim Script only, there's no type checking on the adapter code and testing it means running actual Vim, which keeps the contributor bar low but the review bar high for a plugin touching production credentials.