Beekeeper Studio 5.2 - MongoDB, SQL Anywhere, and an enhanced JSON sidebar

April 24, 2025 By Matthew Rathbone

Headline Features

Lots of huge new features in this release

Full MongoDB support - including the MongoDB Shell and SQL.
SAP SQL Anywhere support
Several formerly paid features are not free
Enhanced JSON Sidebar features
Privacy Mode (hide secrets when sharing screen)
Azure CLI support for EntraID authentication of Azure DBs

Full MongoDB Support

Yes our first NoSQL database integration is done 📌!

We’ve had to customize the app a lot to work with MongoDB, but it was worth it. Here are the most useful features of Beekeeper Studio’s new MongoDB integration:

MongoDB Shell

MongoDB Shell screenshot

The honest-to-goodness legit official MongoDB shell implementation is now available in Beekeeper Studio as a new tab type.

Beekeeper Studio can easily tabulate data when you’re querying. by default if you run a find or findOne it’ll show the results in an easy to browse table, but you can always print values to see them directly in the shell too.

SQL for MongoDB

To support SQL on MongoDB we’ve written our own open source SQL to MongoDB transpiler from scratch to support PostgreSQL dialect SQL execution.

SQL for MongoDB

If you look closely to the screenshot, notice that you can access object values with an intuitive dot notation, like address.zip. This is a slight break from PostgreSQL dialect SQL, but provides a significant usability upgrade for Mongo.

Now for example you can write SELECT address.zip rather than something ugly like SELECT JSON_EXTRACT(address, 'zip') as zip

SAP SQL Anywhere

SQL Anywhere is an embedded database system originally developed by Sybase before they were acquired by SAP. It’s similar to SQLite in that by default it reads and writes to self-contained files. Unlike SQLite SAP also provides a way to run SQL Anywhere in server mode, like a ‘regular’ database.

Beekeeper Studio supports both of these connection methods

Paid Features That Are Now Free

We’re now routinely reviewing paid features and moving some to the free tier whenever we can.

The following formerly paid features are now free for everyone:

Solarized themes (and any future themes)
Query Magics

The JSON sidebar has been a big hit, but v1 had some limitations. We’ve fixed many of these limitations for the v5.2 release.

Edit data in the sidebar!
The sidebar works for query results
Auto-JSON conversion for json-stored-as-text/varchar data

Smaller Additions

Offline license files for air-gapped systems.
Privacy mode - hide sensitive information for when you are sharing your screen
Reopen recently closed tabs.
Open tabs now show by default in the quick-search (like in VSCode).
Loads of bug fixes and minor tweaks.

Merged Pull Requests

Beekeeper Studio 5.2 - MongoDB, SQL Anywhere, and an enhanced JSON sidebar

On This Page

Headline Features

Full MongoDB Support

MongoDB Shell

SQL for MongoDB

SAP SQL Anywhere

Paid Features That Are Now Free

Enhanced JSON Sidebar

Smaller Additions

Merged Pull Requests

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