I built a 30MB database client in Rust. Here's what it cost me.

DBeaver takes about 8 seconds to start on my machine. It idles around 800MB of RAM before I've opened a single connection. It does everything - and that's exactly the problem. Somewhere along the way, we accepted that database tools have to feel like operating systems. Six months ago I decided to find out whether that was actually true. The result is QoreDB, an open-source desktop database client that ships as a ~30MB binary and starts in under a second. This post is about the technical bets tha