// the find
vrmiguel/pgpad
A small, fast cross-platform database client
pgpad is a Tauri-based desktop database client targeting developers who want something faster and free compared to TablePlus or DataGrip. The backend is Rust using tokio-postgres and rusqlite, the frontend is Svelte. Currently supports PostgreSQL and SQLite; MySQL and others are planned but not there yet.
The Rust backend is a real win — tokio-postgres is async-native and the row_writer module with dedicated handlers for intervals, numerics, and bytea means you're not getting string-coerced garbage in result cells. Credential storage is handled in pgpad-core/credentials.rs rather than punted to the OS keychain inconsistently. They bundle AWS RDS and Azure root certs directly, so TLS to managed cloud DBs works out of the box without hunting for cert files. There's an e2e smoke test suite (WebDriverIO) and unit tests on both the Postgres and SQLite paths — rare for a WIP GUI tool.
It's explicitly WIP and the README doesn't hide that, but MySQL being listed as 'planned' with no driver linked yet means a big chunk of the target audience can't use it today. No query autocomplete or schema-aware intellisense — the editor is CodeMirror but it's unclear how much SQL awareness is wired up beyond syntax highlighting. The Svelte frontend is bundled through npm/pnpm which adds a non-trivial setup dependency for a tool pitched on being lightweight — the Tauri architecture is fine, but the build story is npm-first, not cargo-first. Connection management looks file-local (SQLite migrations in pgpad-core/migrations/) which means no team-shared connection catalogs.