Looking for some kind of local DB manager? "application" with a gui
I need to record information about what my cat eats and does, as she might have a food allergy and I need to track down what it is.
So I am after some kind of a user friendly locally hosted database (maybe via some kind of app), preferably Linux friendly.
It would be nice if it had similar relationships to the added image, some kind of relational DB that I can fill with data. But essentially I need to have a bunch of lookup tables to return some data specific to difference events.
Its a bit of a pain (and takes time) to have to write an entire webapp to manage all this from scratch, that's why I am looking for some kind of user friendly GUI way to do it. Surely there must be some kind of relational database managing "application" that lets you set up some lookup tables and enter data in a nice and easy GUI way to do it? sqllitebrowser doesn't count as it doesn't handle linked tables in a nice way (would be nice if its friendly for my wife to use) :)
Personally, I would use a simple spreadsheet for this.
But if you have your heart set on a db, you can use Access or LibreOffice Base for ease of initial setup.
Maybe SQL (or PRQL, if you're feeling cutting edge) with some dbms (SSMS Community I think is still free, or maybe Heidi SQL) but this will require you maintain a server as well. PostgreSQL is what I generally use if I want to spin up something quickly. I do like SQL quite a bit, but it seems overkill for this task.
Perfect application for NocoDB in my opinion. They have a relationship view like the one shown in the screenshot and a form builder for easily adding new data. Setting up the relationships is easy. I find it much easier to use than DBeaver and the GUI is more modern.
The data is accessible by programs such as DBeaver, and they have a REST API too, should you need it.
Hmm, nocodb is a webapp first and foremost. It does have binaries to run directly on the host, but I'm not entirely sure to recommend this over libreoffice actual app for database management. I believe it would be more in line with OPs requirement.
I was looking for something similar for a while, like something for simple relational data with some GUI for data entry, aka "I don't wanna write a little web app just for this". I had used AirTable at work before at work so that's what came to mind and my searching was basically for "open source or selfhosted alternative to AirTable".
Came across some decent candidates, can't remember all the names, but the one I tried, Grist, was pretty straightforward and did the job: easy relational data setup, GUI for all basic data types including file uploads, easy to create input forms, and widgets that talk to the API and you can customize with JavaScript. Setup was easy with docker
EDIT: other names that came up when looking were NocoDB and BaseRow ( I don't remember why I didn't try them for my specific needs)
That's an interesting point, I decided to carry on with the webapp route, but it would be easy to make it "multi-cat" actually. What I really wanted was a lightweight calendar but I couldn't find one that had pre-canned events or had too many other things I didn't want.
Thank you for the suggestions, I tried a bunch and nothing immediately fit. Most were either too complicated for me to create the relationships or I couldn't get the thing locally running (or there wasn't a self hosted option)... Basically stupid user syndrome đ đ€.
So went back to the drawing board of writing a webapp and after a few experiments realised that... All I needed was a calendar with pre-canned event titles, groups for colour to highlight different events... silly me, all I needed was a calendar...
Ended up re-inventing something looking very much like a calendar... sigh... do I carry on or look for some kind of lightweight calendar :/ Just need to have ability to quickly create pre-canned events, would be nice if the events could be related...
On the other hand, its kinda fun to re-invent a calendar haha!
Here is a colour version... totally a calendar đ€Ł
Food for thought (no pun intended), but unless youâre willing to build an app (could be a great app; I doubt youâre the only person who could use this), you might be over engineering this quite a bit. A spreadsheet could be made to do what youâre looking for, with much less effort.
Not a locally run tool, but a self hosted web app (that I wire up to my self hosted db) that has a web portal I login to, and then can manage my db with a nice slick UI to define tables, relations, etc.
There's been some I've found but they vastly lacked basic features and were clearly in very early beta.