There's definitely a need for an application like this, but I'm not sure Daeta makes the grade yet. A few comments:

1) I don't know what UI toolkit they used to create the program, but it's certainly not Mac-like. The menu sometimes does a disappearing act, which can obviously be a pain.

2) You need to set up JDBC drivers for whatever database you want to access, which is fine, but then the process by which you add the driver to Daeta seems overly complex. Why they don't tell you to specifically put the drivers in /Library/Java/Extensions and then auto-detect the drivers, I have no idea. Right now you need to know the database developer's name for the driver and manually enter that. This seems something that is easy to do automatically if the developers wanted to...

3) The URL field is dumb. They should allow the user to create a connection by selecting the database type, entering the URL, the database name, etc. Making the user figure out the URL format is dumb and prone to mistakes. You should be able to select pre-defined servers and select from available databases, etc.

4) It's not clear since there is so little documentation, but it doesn't seem to me that there is a way to actually create a database. I don't mind creating the database in another program, but it would seem this would be a feature that would be very useful. Drag a few fields onto the screen, assign them names, select the server and create a new database.

5) It doesn't seem there's a way a export data from the database.

Basically this app looks like a work-in-progress. It reminds me of an alpha-level app where some of the functionality is there, but the developer hasn't yet spent the time to build a usable user interface. Considering it also hasn't been updated in over a year, I would probably not bother with the app until it is fully overhauled. Let's see what they do for v2.0.

It looks like a great start, although what I'd really like is support for Proteus (http://www.proteusx.com/) in addition to iChat.