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QStudio Now Open Source – Release 5.01

December 6th, 2025 by admin
QStudio 5.0 is now Open Source after 13 years of development!

QStudio remains a fast, modern SQL editor supporting over 30 databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, DuckDB, QuestDB, and kdb+/q. Version 5.0 continues our focus on performance, analytics and extensibility now with an open community behind it.

🎉 QStudio Is Now Open Source

After 13 years of development, QStudio is now fully open source under a permissive license. Developers, data analysts and companies can now contribute features, inspect the code, and build extensions.

QStudio 5.0

Open Source Without the Fine Print.

No enterprise edition. No restrictions. No locked features. QStudio is fully open for personal, professional, and commercial use.

New Features with 5.0

New Table Formatters, Better Visuals, Better Reporting

Table FormattersSmartDisplay is QStudio’s column-based automatic formatting system. By adding simple _SD_* suffixes to column names, you can enable automatic number, percentage, and currency formatting,Sparklines, microcharts and much more. This mirrors the behaviour of the Pulse Web App, but implemented natively for QStudio’s result panel.

Spark Lines + Micro Charts

sparklines sparkbars rendered from SQL queries

Comprehensive Chart Configuration

Fine-tune axes, legends, palettes, gridlines and interactivity directly inside the chart builder.

Chart Config

New Chart Themes

Excel, Tableau and PowerBI-inspired styles for faster insight and cleaner dashboards.

Chart Themes

Other Major Additions

  • Back / Forward Navigation — full browser-like movement between queries.
  • Smart Display (SD) — auto-formats tables with min/max shading and type-aware formatting.
  • Conditional Formatting — highlight rows or columns based on value rules.
  • New Code Editor Themes — dark, light and popular IDE-style themes.
  • Extended Syntax Highlighting — Python, Scala, XPath, Clojure, RFL, JFlex and more.
  • Improved kdb+/q Support — nested / curried functions now visible and navigable.
  • Search All Open Files (Ctrl+Shift+F)
  • Navigation Tabs in Query History — with pinning.
  • Improved Chinese Translation
  • DuckDB Updated to latest engine.
  • Hundreds of minor UI and performance improvements
  • Legacy Java Removed — cleaner, modern codebase.

 

Code Editor Improvements

Better auto-complete, themes and tooling for large SQL files.

Code Themes

Pinned Results

Pin results within the history pane for later review or comparison.

Pinned Tabs

Search Everywhere

Control+Shift+F to search all open files and your currently selected folder.

Code Themes

Our History

  • 2013–2024: QStudio provided syntax highlighting, autocomplete, fast CSV/Excel export and cross-database querying.
  • Version 2.0: QStudio expands support to 30+ Databases.
  • Version 3.0: Introduced DuckDB integration, Pulse-Pivot, Improved export options.
  • Version 4.0: Introduced SQL Notebooks and modern visuals.
  • Version 5.0: Open Source + hundreds of improvements across charts, editing, navigation and data analysis.

We aim to create the best open SQL editor for analysts and engineers. If you spot a bug or want a feature added, please open an issue

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The Big Data Events of 2024

January 2nd, 2025 by Ryan Hamilton
pyarrow downloads

PyArrow dowloads

  1. Open source tools are now as performant as pre-existing commercial offerings for data analysis and in many ways offer more features.
    Proof: See the time-series benchmarks and note how many are open source: https://www.timestored.com/data/time-series-database-benchmarks
  2. Everyone has discovered that column-oriented storage and vector execution is the secret to fast analytics.
  3. Arrow format has won. It is now a cornerstone technology used in python, numpy, polars, duckdb, R.
    Pandas replaces numpy with arrow, DuckDB quacks arrow, QuestDB will support arrow, InfluxDB (2023), Polars is built upon Apache Arrow.
  4. Apache parquet has won as the lowest common denominator for basic data storage.
    QuestDB queries parquet, DuckDB supports parquet (2021), Clickhouse , GreptimeDB uses Arrow and Parquet.
  5. Iceberg vs Delta vs Hudi. Iceberg won. AWS announcement.

 

Trends of 2024

DuckDB is on course to become the defacto column oriented database that all others will be compared to.
Clickhouse conquered a number of enterprises but difficuly deploying and getting started now seem like key factors that held it back.

DuckDB Downloads

DuckDB Downloads

DuckDB Stars

DuckDB Stars

Underlying Factors

Why has SQL and python won? In many ways these are terrible languages (GIL , SET theory) but they won? I can’t say all the reasons but some things that I believe worked in favour:

  1. Open Source + Free = Hard to beat. We’ve seen open-source companies (license disputes mentioned below) take over every area. VCs and startups have realised making big money selling dev tools requires solving two problems: distribution + technology and the harder one is now distribution. The important thing is getting your product into the hands and heads of as many people as possible. Once there, you can withhold all useful enterprise features and charge for them, assuming AWS doesn’t try the same trick. I do wonder if this is causing the death of otherwise small viable software bsuinesses.
  2. Google = a second brain that worked on keyword search. Languages that had judicial overloading are harder to search than languages with many function names. Google makes it easier to find uniquely named functions that python has. Does anyone still read the manual? nevermind the 500+ page language bibles that were the only way to learn languages 20 years ago?
  3. AI – It hasn’t been a factor to date but AI is similar to the google benefit but even more. The more data and usage, the more chance AI can write your code, write your query etc. Will this reinforce the benefit that fully expanded syntax and popularity already provides? APL could be even more dead than it is already.

 

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