Lately I've been on the hunt for a personal database application that I could use to store, manipulate, and explore data important to me. I think I'm at least now able to articulate what it is I want, but I haven't yet been able to find anything that perfectly matches the daydream.

The Daydream

Put simply, I want a user-friendly GUI that wraps a real database, but that is meant to be run and used locally. Something like Airtable, but as a local application, not a web app. (And no, a self-hosted version of something like NocoDB doesn't count. I don't want or need to run this as a server application.)

The UI would intentionally obscure most of the databasey bits, just like Airtable does.

• Data types would be friendly and practical, like Airtable's "text", "number", "rating", "image", etc.. Sure, these friendly data types would be built upon basic database primitives like BOOLEAN, INT, and varchar(255), but I don't want to have to care about that.
• Similarly, I don't want to have to care about SQL queries (by default). Really there should be no mention of the term "SQL" anywhere, unless a user wants to dig into that.

A lot of this is inspired by Steph Ango's File over App ideology, and the way it's been applied to Obsidian. I want the app to be offline-first, and built upon durable, open file formats without lock-in. (Probably either SQLite or something NoSQL like MongoDB that can store its data as flat JSON files.)

Current Options

Beekeeper Studio gets closest to what I'm envisioning. It's designed to be run on a PC, not in a web browser. It has a spreadsheet-like view for manipulating the database. It even has things called Query Magics that are custom SQL queries you can run to apply some nicer UI to your database. But still, you have to know what a SQL query is. You still have to know and understand that there's a database under there doing things.

I also like what Simon Willison is doing with Datasette. It's a tool for viewing, exploring, and sharing data. I'd love for some of these ideas to be applied to Beekeeper somehow.

For now I'm going to give Beekeeper a try and see if it can fit enough of my needs to suffice. It is missing some things I'd like, but it's also open source and community-driven, so maybe I could contribute, or at least discuss my vision with the community.