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Comment by jafingi | Hacker News Reader

PGAdmin 4 is one of the worst software releases I have ever experienced. Version 3 worked fine, but everything was destroyed with 4. So many things not working, UI bugs, and you have to click multiple times to get to the same point as you could in one click in 3.

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What a clusterfuck of a disaster pgadmin4 is. This is what happens when you decide to dismiss technology (electron) without understanding what the issues with it actually are.

It's using Qt, but QtWebEngine rather than QtWidgets or QtQuick. Qt is a great pick, iff you're building a native desktop app rather than a web app.

It's so depressing. I packaged it up for Arch Linux recently without realizing how bad the whole thing was. I'll probably be taking it out of the repos soon seeing as it doesn't even start anymore...

Fortunately pgAdmin3 is not going anywhere for now because BigSQL maintains an LTS release that stays compatible with the most recent Postgres versions: https://www.openscg.com/bigsql/pgadmin3/

So I simply continue to use pgAdmin3 until something better comes along because I also really didn't like pgAdmin4.

This is good news.

It seems like the BigSQL version of PgAdmin3 doesn't support SSL connections to the server:

https://bitbucket.org/openscg/pgadmin3-lts/issues/2/ssl-mode...

Is that really the case? :(

Could work around it with stunnel until it's resolved

PgAdmin 3 throws all kinds of errors with Postgres 9.6.

Not the version by BigSQL.

Is there a separate installer for their pgAdmin3 LTS version? It's bundled with their PostgreSQL server, which I don't want to install locally, but can't be deselected during setup.

I honestly can't recall any piece of open source software being disparaged this badly on HN. People here are not given to panning such work, yet here we see very little restraint in the criticism. pgadmin 4 must really have some problems.

I've never tried it; I could tell from the requirements and the "deployment" instructions that I wanted nothing to do with it. Guess I saved myself some grief.

edit: looking back a bit I find this[1] "Ask HN":

   "The problem with pgAdmin 4 is that it is garbage"

And no one contradicts this claim.

To my mind this situation indicates severe dysfunction in the PostgresQL community. All indications are that pgadmin 4 has been failing hard for at least a year now, and worse, whomever is responsible for this appears oblivious.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180966

Yes! Thank you thank you thank you!!!

I wish I could have said this myself. I feel there is a strong desire to get these issues out in the open and deal with this situation. Sadly, no moves are being made by those capable of doing so. If I can help in any way I would gladly do so.

I believe you are doing precisely the best possible thing; provide a good alternative. A good alternative obviates all the excuses.

"Failing hard" and "severe dysfunction" probably aren't the most realistic ways of describing it. The situation isn't good, but it also isn't bad enough for terms such as those to apply.

While it isn't exactly a pleasant tool to use, it's not like it's totally broken either. I've used other similar software that was much worse to use than pgAdmin 4 is.

It's slightly better than pgAdmin 3 in some ways, but it's also worse in other ways. Overall, it's mediocre. That might be the underlying problem: it doesn't live up to the high expectations that the rest of the PostgreSQL ecosystem tends to set.

If I had to give it a grade, I'd say it's a B- or a C+. It could be a lot worse, but it could also be a lot better.

I think "failing hard" is reasonable considering how much worse it is than the workhorse v3 that it replaces. I don't find it anything like "mediocre". It is the buggiest software I use regularly and has made doing simple things with Postgres harder and significantly more time consuming.

It IS worse than pgAdmin 3 in every possible way I can think of. It is slow, clunky and bug-ridden. Is freezes and crashes all the time. It lacks tons of features already available in pgAdmin 3. It doesn't bring anything new to the table other than being rewritten as a webapp.

Have to agree. I was using pgAdmin 3 that had its issues on Mac. When 4 came out, it looked so nice and I thought "finally they made it!". But after 5 minutes I figured out what kind clusterfuck it actually became. On the one hand, I cannot imagine who actually releases such a crap. On the other, it's foss and I feel bad complaining about stuff that somebody probably built in his free time.

PGAdmin 3 was simple and worked flawlessly. PGAdmin 4 is basically broken and unusable. I was forced to look for alternatives and ended up with PyCharm/Datagrip. It works great but is missing one key feature in that it can't list all the databases under a single server, something they are working to resolve.

I especially like the bit where HTML in a row actually gets parsed by PGAdmin 4. Apparently it does strip dangerous content, after some playing around with it, but holy hell, why would it be a good idea to even have this functionality?

I've given up on PGAdmin 4 for the next year at least.

Your comment made me so happy. I was asking myself if I was crazy, surely I was missing something for it to be this bad.

I really wish they would get it right, Postgres is such a powerful tool, it doesn't do it any justice.

As I understand it, one of the benefits of pgAdmin 4 is the ability to be deployed as a web application, phpMyAdmin-style.

Is pgAdmin4 only horrible as a desktop application or is it horrible in general?

I uninstalled PgAdmin4 after multiple attempts to use it. I'm not sure what all the errors are, but it even goes so far as to block system updates with all the mixed up dependencies.

PgAdmin3 still works great, and I see no reason to move from it, but for me, Emacs + postgres is great for building up tables and procedures, pgsql is great for admin, and PgAdmin is great for data inspection. I really wish all of this was unified in one environment, but nearly nothing works globally.

Have you tried to get to the bottom of a large result set yet? Rediculous. I feel your pain. Postgres is the equal of so many enterprise databases but pgadmin not so much.

If we could just get Postage named PGAdmin5 we'd really be in a good spot.

I've quite enjoyed 4 for the sole reason that it hasn't crashed once on me. I haven't been able to figure out why, but 3 has always been weirdly susceptible to it on my machines.

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