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Faruk Durgut
Faruk Durgut

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I built a PostgreSQL client in Rust because DBeaver was eating my RAM

#rust #postgres #opensource #showdev

My daily laptop has 8GB of RAM. Not a lot by modern standards, but enough — until I open DBeaver.

DBeaver at idle: ~400MB. Add a browser, a terminal, maybe a local Docker container running Postgres, and half my RAM is gone before I've written a single query. pgAdmin wasn't much better.

So I did what any reasonable developer would do: I spent my weekends building a replacement.

Meet Ferox

Ferox is a lightweight native desktop PostgreSQL client written entirely in Rust.

No Electron. No JVM. No web engine. Just a native binary that starts in under 200ms and sits at ~25MB RAM at idle.

→ https://github.com/frkdrgt/ferox

Features

  • Multi-tab query editor — SQL syntax highlighting, Ctrl+T for new tab, persistent query history
  • Schema browser — lazy-loaded tree with filter: schemas, tables, views, materialized views, foreign tables
  • Data browser — double-click any table to browse with server-side pagination and ORDER BY
  • Visual Join Builder — pick your tables, pick your columns, get ready-to-run SQL
  • EXPLAIN visualizer — tree view of query plans with cost and timing per node
  • Inline editing — double-click a cell, edit, Enter to commit an UPDATE
  • Export — CSV and JSON via native OS file dialog

The Architecture

The design is intentionally simple. Two threads, one channel each:

┌─────────────────────────────┐
│     UI Thread (egui)        │
│  immediate-mode rendering   │
└────────┬──────────┬─────────┘
         │ DbCommand│ DbEvent
         ▼          ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│     DB Thread (tokio)       │
│  tokio-postgres + native-tls│
└─────────────────────────────┘
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The UI thread sends DbCommand variants (Execute, LoadSchemas, LoadDetails, etc.) and receives DbEvent variants back (QueryResult, Tables, Error, etc.). The UI never blocks — it just renders whatever state it has and updates when events arrive.

// Sending a query from UI thread
let _ = self.db_tx.send(DbCommand::Execute(sql));

// Receiving results in the same UI update loop
while let Ok(event) = self.db_rx.try_recv() {
    match event {
        DbEvent::QueryResult(result) => { /* update state */ }
        DbEvent::QueryError(msg)     => { /* show error   */ }
        _                            => {}
    }
}
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This pattern keeps egui's immediate-mode rendering smooth — no await, no blocking, no Arc> gymnastics.

Why egui?

I wanted a pure-Rust GUI with no system dependencies beyond what Rust itself provides. egui is immediate-mode (like Dear ImGui), which means the entire UI is re-rendered every frame from application state. No widget tree to manage, no data binding, no reactivity framework.

For a database client this works surprisingly well — tables, scroll areas, and text inputs are all first-class citizens in egui.

Tech Stack

Role Crate
GUI egui + eframe
PostgreSQL driver tokio-postgres
Async runtime tokio
TLS native-tls + postgres-native-tls
Syntax highlighting syntect
Config serde + toml
File dialogs rfd

Numbers

Metric Ferox DBeaver
RAM at idle ~25 MB ~400 MB
Startup <200ms 5–15s
Binary size ~12 MB ~200 MB

What's Next

  • Auto-complete (table names, column names, keywords)
  • SSH tunnel support
  • ER diagram view
  • Multiple simultaneous connections
  • Dark/light theme toggle

It's v0.1.0 and rough around the edges, but it's been my daily driver for a few weeks now. Pre-built binaries for Windows, macOS (universal), and Linux are on the releases page.

If you've ever been frustrated by heavy database tools on modest hardware, give it a try.

GitHub: https://github.com/frkdrgt/ferox

Feedback and contributions welcome.

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