PgAdmin 4 v1.0 released | Hacker News Reader

PgAdmin 4 v1.0 released

pgadmin.org

174 pointssbuttgereit59 comments

I tried using and liking pgAdmin 4 beta for a few months. Even simple things like copy-paste from clipboard using Cmd-C/V, exporting/importing data to/from my local machine, etc were a hassle. Add to that the slow startup, sluggishness, and poor UX. I'm happily using Valentina Studio now. A small data point for others who may come to this thread looking for PostgreSQL GUI tools.

I've been using JetBrains DataGrip for my postgres needs. Been pretty good.

DataGrip is pretty good (used it since it was in beta), though I've found it a bit lacking if you're wanting to do some quick imports of data. Navicat works great however.

My experience has been so so. It crashes often, particularly on windows. And it grinds to a halt f you have a long sql (1000 lines +)

Thanks for the hint.

I am using the older version and is one of my favourite PostgresSQL GUI tools.

Another tool victim of the craziness to pack web pages as desktop applications and being written in Python and JavaScript is already an indication the performance you describe.

So I will stick with the current version until I find a good alternative, checking Valentina Studio now.

I love pgAdmin 3 but its almost-native UI is occasionally the result of program-breaking frustrations

I can second that it breaks standard OS UI like copy/paste. DataGrid looks good, but pricey.

Try EMS SQL manager for postgresql. We are using it for years now, and releases follow postgresql roadmap (9.5 fully supported). At professional level, we've never been disappointed / found a no-go in it.

There's a commercial license i'm glad to pay for, and the free(lite) edition is just fine for most needs

http://www.sqlmanager.net/en/products/postgresql/manager/mat...

(it might totaly sound like a commercial "happy customer" review, and it actually is)

What about the QT UI they mention on the site? Is it that bad?

I am for one disappointed its no longer a native app and that its been reduced to a "web" app :(

It's not really accurate to call the desktop runtime a 'web' app... I also hope the UI will approach a native feel over time though.

At least they didn't try to make it some node/electron application and just let you use your browser. Using Python/HTML/JS greatly lowers the barrier to entry for contributions when compared to C. Hopefully it means better features/development.

I am for one excited it is available as a "web" app and are going in a new direction.

PGadmin was functional, I'll give it that, but it paled in comparison to MySQL's tools. If this can speed up development and make it better then I'm all for it.

Maybe they could integrate this[1] into it?

1. http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization/

Really wish Sequel Pro[1] supported PostgreSQL... the issue tracking it[2] has a ton of support but has been open for years. The developer posted it may be available this year though!

[1]: https://www.sequelpro.com/ [2]: https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/362

I've found PSequel [1] to be a nice alternative though!

[1] http://www.psequel.com/

I installed this yesterday for about 10 minutes to look around. The UI (which is the main reason for PSQL GUI!) is all over the place. I find Postico and Postgres.app perfectly sufficient for my PSQL needs. Postico feels quite similar to SequelPro which I used previously so perhaps there is some bias there but I'll wait for PgAdmin to mature some more.

Postico looks great. Thank you for mentioning it.

I run a local instance of Pgweb [1]. While not as feature packed, I find it sufficient. As another comment notes, PgAdmin has a lot of GUI related quirks making it awkward to use.

[1]: https://github.com/sosedoff/pgweb

+1 for pgweb, it's really nicely made and nice to use.

Postico for Mac is also very nice to use:

https://eggerapps.at/postico/

The day PostgreSQL had a decent development suite, that's the day PGSQL is going to rocket, it's sad that even the freaking MySQL and SQLite have better (free) tools.

Can you expand on what you think is missing that's available for MySQL and SQLite?

I completely agree with SadWebDeveloper. Postgres is seriously lacking a good UI. Or maybe another way to put it is that as someone coming from MSSQL and MySql, it seems the "postgres people" are used to a completely different way of work that feels odd to me.

Having worked with MSSQL for years, MS hit the right spot with Management Studio. It's an UI focused on writing SQL, and any wizard has a "Generate SQL for this" button. It let me write huge SQL files, save them, reopen then and run them. When I found dbForge Studio for MySql, I felt at home. I wish postgres had something like that.

Last week I went through ALL the GUIs in the postgres wiki page and found nothing good. Valentina Studio and EMS are good, but not great. EMS has a lot of features, but honestly it bothers me it cannot even use the default system font in windows, the environment it's built to run on. It's like it's stuck in 2002.

If I could sum it up, the thing I miss the most is being able to work with SQL. I want the first button in the toolbar to be a "New SQL Query" that opens a huge editor that lets me write and run SQL. Not a "new database", not "new project". Amazingly, most postgresql UIs are simply terrible at writing and running sql.

It's like postgres uis are like the PHP of database UIs: people that like it have no idea how bad they are, and the very few people go elsewhere to see how much better the world is outside.

I think this is because most PostgreSQL professionals use the command line tools, especially psql, which is miles ahead of any command line tools the competition has. And when the experts do not use the GUI tools there will not be any feedback from people who know what a UI for a database must be able to perform. It is a chicken and the egg problem.

Completely agree about MS SQL Server Management Studio, such an amazing DB management GUI. If it could be cloned, screen for screen for PG then there would be no obstacle to world domination.

I mostly use psql but I use pgadmin3 when I use a GUI (apparently now pgadmin4, but I haven't tried the new version yet) and there's a new query button that opens a big text window in which one can write SQL. You can press F5 to run the query in that window, and can highlight parts of the query to run them specifically. The output is in an adjustable-size pane with adjustable-size columns at the bottom of the window.

I have used other database management tools. To me, it seems that pgadmin3's New Query window behaves pretty similarly to Microsoft's New Query window. I've used several other database GUIs (SQLyog, others) but there are none that, IMO, are night-and-day better than pgadmin3 for my basic uses.

I definitely believe that pgadmin3's interface for adding columns to tables is onerous, but that doesn't happen very often since MVC frameworks brought schema definition as code into the mainstream.

IMHO pgadmin X is a mess... finding were the tables, indexes and views when you first run pgadmin is dauting. Then setting permissions or properties for tables is mostly useless since they don't work at all (most of the time you have to get and fix the SQL generated rather than using the GUI). To this day its still baffles me why Python developers choose PGSQL as his defacto DB standard.

SSMS is fantastic. Missing indexes alone is a killer feature.

I've always just used psql and found it sufficient for my needs. What am I missing by not using a GUI/dev tool? e.g. What would I find easier, or what is possible in the gui that is impossible or difficult from the CLI? Honest question, no snark or CLI elitism intended

Leisurely thumbing through things like indexes and foreign key constraints, one handedly.

Helps a lot if you deal with many databases.

I use CLI for everything else, but not for day-to-day database work. Maybe the biggest reason is that with GUI tools, I can directly manipulate the data that I'm seeing in a grid. That's helpful primarily with the local/test versions of the database.

The productivity gains to be able to have an IDE like experience to manipulate data.

- ER data modeling.

- Visual representation of the database objects

- Completion while typing and visual representation of SQL errors

- Ability to change anything on the database without having to know by earth all SQL differences across different RDMS

- Exporting data into various formats

A few examples,

http://www.valentina-db.com/en/valentina-studio-key-features

https://www.jetbrains.com/datagrip/features/

I use CLI stuff for most things, but I've found it much easier to have 5-10 sql statements in a GUI editor that I can edit arbitrarily and run at will. And the GUI results grid is nicer to get around for results sets of pretty much any size. I'd kind of like it actually if somebody could make a command line editor or Vim variant that could do that.

Have you tried this? https://github.com/ivalkeen/vim-simpledb

This. I have found it to be a great replacement for GUI tools. There are probably a few features I'd add like some kind of a snippets manager but I still find it hard to beat for reading data. For wanting to edit though, its definitely lacking.

I find using GUI tools makes it much easier to discuss results with non-database or non-technical types (like everyone huddled around a monitor), as a spreadsheet-like table view is much easier to grok then the tab/comma-delimited output of CLI tools

Seems like a good place to ask:

I just want some good GUI for data entry. For querying, command line already covers like 90% of my needs. I don't mean something like Access for postgres or a full-fledged CMS which will mess with my beautiful, hand-crafted schema - I need just a table view with BLOB support (like choosing a file and maybe showing a preview if image) and foreign key support (like autocomplete).

Does anyone know a tool like this? I can pay - just need to be able to install it on my machine.

Something like this maybe? https://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/windows/excel/

Are you looking for PG specific stuff, or pretty much any kind of simple database?

If non-PG is fine, then maybe sqlitebrowser.org?

You'd want to grab the latest nightly though, as our foreign key constraint handling needs improvement, and there is good progress with that in the nightly builds. :)

Sqlite is perfectly fine, at the very least, quite easy to to transfer the entered data to postgres. Thank you for the suggestion, I'll look into this.

Cool. :)

To view blobs, just keep the "Edit Database Cell" dock open (it's under the View menu).

Any time you select a cell with an image in it, the image will be displayed in that dock. You can just leave that dock open and keep working on stuff in the main table area if you want.

If you don't mind using a web app, TeamPostgreSQL[1] has data entry for the database tables, with column-specific widgets laid out in a grid. This includes file upload/download widgets for BLOB columns, and as far as I remember even image thumbnails if the binary data is images.

[1] http://www.teampostgresql.com

I'm glad that things are improving. Still very slow and kind of hard to use, unfortunately. I recommend Postico: https://eggerapps.at/postico/

Seconded. Postico is very nice, atleast for my simple needs.

You will pry pgadmin3 from my cold dead hands.

An unexpected but very welcome surprise. I thought pgadmin3 was all we would ever get (for an "official" admin tool). Glad Pg have made the effort to look after developers.

weird coincidence. just installed pgsql-portable 9.6.0 and tried the included pgadmin4 on Win10 x64. very slow to start :(

will keep using the excellent http://www.heidisql.com/

probably not as fully featured for serious admin tasks, but it's fast, lightweight and works well for daily db tasks for SQLserver, mysql variants and postgres. i encourage everyone to donate.

Couldn't agree more! I have already donated to Heidisql - I use it for all my Mysql and MS SQL Server needs and I totally love it. Heidiqsl is very fast, very light, makes it easy to export (copy paste) data, write queries and modify your table. What else could anybody want?

However I am not very keen on using it for Postgresql until that "experimental" flag is removed.

I'm a big fan of SQuirrel SQL. Sometimes the Java process consumes all my memory, still had far less crashes than using any client.

What an utterly awful move. What were they thinking?

pgadmin3-1.22.1.zip: 12.7MB

pgadmin4-1.0-x86.exe: 82.5MB

First impressions:

Much, much slower to load than pgAdmin3.

>The software has the look and feel of a desktop application

No it doesn't. I don't think the person who wrote this even knows what "the look and feel of a desktop application" means. I can tell within a second of it starting that it's not a native application, which basically by definition means it doesn't have "the look and feel of a desktop application". In fact, I have no idea what they are talking about when they say "the look and feel of a desktop application." I can't detect a single thing which seems to imply any effort in this regard. I would be genuinely interested to know what on earth they think in pgAdmin4 has "the look and feel of a desktop application".

I open the preferences window. The preferences "window" is not a window. It's an overlay in the main window, which cannot be moved. Context "menus" are similar, and thus cannot exceed the bounds of the main window, which is not how they are supposed to work. Not even the windows, beside the main window, are real. "The look and feel of a desktop application"?

What the UI does scream is not "a desktop application", but Bootstrap.

I try to connect to a server. The tree view "+" icon for expanding a level in the hierarchy has a loading spinner superimposed over it, which is not a convention I recall ever seeing before. The loading spinner doesn't end. It never becomes possible to do anything with the server. I have to restart the programme and try again. This time it works.

When I expand the items in the tree view for the first time, the icons for the tree view items are initially absent and flash into place, as the images are loaded.

Compared to pgAdmin3, it's horrible and borderline unusable. It's also slower.

>...and vastly improves on pgAdmin III with updated user interface elements, >multi-user/web deployment options, dashboards and a more modern design.

It's slower to respond. It's slower to start. It uses more resources. It's a godforsaken web application. It is infinitely less like "a desktop application" than pgAdmin3 because pgAdmin3, unlike pgAdmin4, was a desktop application.

There are also stupid animations, such as fade effects, which constitute completely unnecessary delays to what should be a functional interface.

For some reason context menus sometimes open a substantial distance from the mouse cursor.

Even for a web application, there are parts which are quite poorly styled.

If they wanted to develop a web application, fine, but why call it pgAdmin? This is not in any meaningful sense a "pgAdmin 4". It's a completely new, different, IMO inferior product that someone has decided to call "pgAdmin 4" in an attempt to terminate pgAdmin3. So I reject the premise that "pgAdmin 4" can be considered a legitimate successor to "pgAdmin 3", because it isn't. It's something completely different, falsely purporting to be pgAdmin. If they decided they wanted to make a web-based PostgreSQL administration tool, then do that. If they don't want to maintain a native application anymore, they could at least state as much and not release this product-killing copout absurdly spun as some sort of improvement or natural successorship.

Even the authors seem to implicitly admit it's a different product, what with the default install directory: "C:\Program Files (x86)\pgAdmin 4\v1". v1 of v4.

They could've added support for HiDPI screens in pgAdmin and call it v4. Standing ovations would be a guarantee.

But no, they opted for a full rewrite with messy bowl of jQuery UI plugins and second-long animations.

I think they needed something like a re-write; pgAdmin III was not good but did have a few features which just didn't exist the same way elsewhere... but this was not the re-write they were looking for.

I don't really use pgAdmin anymore (psql for the win) but, was hoping that this would be nice: it's not. Apparently my experience is mirrored by many others (I wanted to see if it was just me or not)... oh well.

Second this! What a horrible "upgrade"! I'll keep using pgadmin 3.

Unsigned macOS binary :(

Spoke to the project lead about this earlier today.

They'd hit a problem where signing wasn't working, which turned out to be because the framework bundles inside the .app were in an older format. The bundled OSX "codesign" util was just barfing.

Gave them a working shell script to fix the problem, which they'll probably adjust / clean up + add to their build process.

So, next releases shouldn't have this issue. :)

Navicat Essentials is still my fav PG GUI https://www.navicat.com/products/navicat-essentials#mac

Cool that have moved over to the web, still miss the graphical relations view that i love from phpmyadmin.

All I want to know is does the desktop version finally have tabs for separate queries?

It's all one version now. The desktop version is just a wrapper showing the web UI written in Python and Javascript/jQuery.

Short answer: YES!

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