Well, it finally happened. I upgraded my OS to Big Sur and as expected a number of issues arose due to incompatible software. This is further compounded by moving off Intel chips to the new Apple M1 chip. Yes, it’s a lovely piece of silicon, and is a good deal faster to use in day to day operations than the older Intel designed chip, but of course has introduced a few snags. The main one being anything ‘Microsoft’ now won’t work – for example, running VMWare and having a Windows virtual machine just isn’t happening right now. The code doesn’t exist to allow Windows to run on the M1 chip.
However, by far the biggest issue (for me) is the lowly ‘Sequel Pro’ software I’ve been using for years to access databases on different servers. It won’t work, and since it is not being actively developed, will never work on Big Sur.
RIP, Sequel Pro… and welcome to Sequel Ace!
Sequel Ace is available in the Apple App store, and is the new database management tool, maintained by developers from Sequel Pro. It’s updated and works on my M1 and Big Sur. Whoop!
“What about all those saved favourites…?” I hear you cry! And you’re right – there is a bit of work to do if you’ve got some favourites that you need to open on Sequel Ace that you used to have on Sequel Pro. Fortunately, you’ve got a few options.
Firstly, did you happen to keep a note of your passwords for each database somewhere handy? If so, you’ll be best off just re-creating those favourites, by typing in the credentials for each that you need. If not, you’ve got some work to do, diving into the guts of your OS and moving things around.
As with anything, please make a backup of the files and work on the copies, rather than the originals… just in case!
Then, search google for Harry Bailey’s excellent article on Medium.com – it’s all there:
https://medium.com/@harrybailey/migration-from-sequel-pro-to-sequel-ace-c6a579399c90
I don’t take any responsibility for the details in the article, but I read through it and it seemed perfectly reasonable to me. However, I’m one of those that has a local copy (encrypted of course) of things like database passwords.
One other thing, when connecting through SSH, Sequel Ace doesn’t automatically search for your .pem files in the ~/.ssh folder so you will need to navigate around. If you frequently use your .pem files, then Sequel Pro will offer you a handy ‘recent locations’ option to get to wherever you store your .pem’s.
It’s very early days – I downloaded and installed Sequel Ace earlier today, but so far I am impressed with the speed of it. The earlier version (‘Pro’) was not slow, and perhaps it’s the new M1 chip I am experiencing, but Sequel Ace seems fast. It also returns some of the features I have missed in the last versions of ‘Pro’, and offers more besides. I am not a ‘power user’ by any means, but I am sure many Mac users who need to access databases will find Sequel Ace the right tool for the job.