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MAD Designer icon

MAD Designer

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Native macOS, iOS, and headless Linux BI tool with a visual ad-hoc SQL query builder and banded report designer for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server & SQLite.

MAD Designer's visual query designer.

Cost / License

  • Free
  • Open Source (MIT)

Application type

Since

  • New

Updated

  • Updated Nov 2026

Platforms

  • Mac  Native AppKit desktop application requiring macOS 12.0 (Monterey) or later. Distributed as a standalone .dmg installer and .zip archive on GitHub Releases, or installable via Homebrew (`brew install --cask mthomason/tap/mad-designer`).
  • iPhone  Native UIKit application for iPhone and iPad requiring iOS / iPadOS 15.0 or later. Currently built and installed from source via Xcode (`Reports.xcworkspace`, `MAD Designer` scheme) under the MIT license.
  • Linux  Headless reporting engine and command-line interface (`mad`) compiled natively on Linux using clang, libobjc2, and GNUstep across 11 core frameworks. Available as a prebuilt Docker image.
MAD Designer's report designer screen.
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What is MAD Designer?

MAD (Mobile Analytics Document) is an open-source business intelligence and banded reporting platform written in Objective-C for native macOS (AppKit), iOS/iPadOS (UIKit), and headless Linux (GNUstep).

Unlike web-based BI dashboards that require cloud hosting or JVM report servers, MAD stores a report's schema snapshot, SQL query model, banded visual layout, and optional result cache inside a single portable .mad file (<100 KB, backed by SQLite and bzip2).

Key Features:

  • Native Database Connectors: Connects directly to PostgreSQL (libpq), MySQL/MariaDB (libmariadb), Microsoft SQL Server (FreeTDS), and SQLite (sqlite3) without JDBC or ODBC middleware.
  • MAD Query (Visual Ad-Hoc SQL Builder): Inspects database schemas, builds joins (Inner, Left, Right, Full), filters, groupings, aggregates, and sorting visually, or parses pasted SQL statements back into the visual query model.
  • MAD Designer (Banded Report Layout): Traditional banded report designer supporting Report Header, Page Header, Group Headers, Report Detail, Group Footers, Page Footer, and Report Footer bands with static labels, data fields, two-pass aggregate functions (SUM, AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX), and vector barcodes/QR codes (powered by Zint).
  • MAD Viewer & Exporters: Materializes query results into a local SQLite cache to compute cross-group aggregates and exports reports to PDF, HTML, CSV, TSV, JSON, or Markdown.
  • Headless Linux Engine & CLI: Includes a headless Linux CLI (mad) and Docker container (ghcr.io/mthomason/mad) to inspect, refresh against live databases, and render .mad reports in CI/CD pipelines or cron jobs.

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