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 and Gregory Garden. Broadly, Matthew does the backend platform stuff, and Gregory does the UI and UX stuff. Together we make a good team!

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

Neither of us are DBAs or server administrators, but we build software for a living, so we have to interact with databases on a daily basis.

We got frustrated that there wasn't a straightforward and approachable cross-platform SQL client we 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. We loved Sequel Pro on MacOS, but that's no good when working on Linux, or with SQLite, Postgres, or SQL Server.

So in 2019 we started working on Beekeeper Studio. It took almost a year of our (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 we 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 Matthew has built four apps named Beekeeper. Two were internal tools at Foursquare, and one was his (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 he became so fond of the name that he just can't stop naming products *Beekeeper*.

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

More About Matthew and Gregory

Matthew is an independant software consultant working with tools like Spark, Hadoop, Ansible, and AWS. He's been working with 'data tools' for a decade. He knows Gregory from working with him at Kickbox.
Gregory chooses not to have much of an online presence. Occasionally he will team up with Matthew to work on new projects, but usually prefers traveling or creating art and music.

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