Comment by systems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systems | Hacker News Reader

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It kinda always baffled me that MySQL always had better (free) GUIs (MySQL WorkBench) while what was in my opinion (and nowadays I think most others) didnt have any good ones

There were always some commercial GUIs for PGSQL, but the free or opensource ones were very bad

PgAdmin is very bad in my opinion, functional, but .. i guess i never really liked that it was web based, it felt slow and clunky and the aesthetics were off

Now Azure Data Studio have a PG Plugin, I didnt try it yet, but I used Azure Data Studio for MS SQL, and I am starting to like it a lot, I do hope Azure Data Studio continue to support many more DBMSes and hope that it get more adoption and support for PGSQL and from the PGSQL community

EDIT

One more thing I want to mention, Azure Data Stuido, have a feature that currently only support MS SQL, its the database project

In a DB Project on ADS (Azure Data Studio), you work on your DB declaratively , i.e. you work on a SQL script that describe your table or other objects (A Create Statement) and the Poject tooling auto generation to alt and deployment scripts by comparing changes vs target , you can deploy directly from ADS or generate a dakpac to be executed as part of your CI/CD

Also since all you code is simple .sql file you can easily use source control

All other tools mentioned below have nothing that come close, not even DataGrip from Jetbrain

I do hope that MS will add support for other DBs to their Database Project feature in ADS, its an amazing feature, and the only way one should work on a DB

I've found DBeaver [1] to be a good replacement after giving up with pgAdmin3 (I did love pgAdmin2, however).

Datagrip is also fine if you're a Jetbrains user.

[1] https://dbeaver.io/

+1 for DataGrip. It's not perfect, but it's miles ahead of anything else I've used in the recent past.

Datagrip’s main selling point for me is that it’s a familiar UI over most databases one uses day to day.

I hop into the native apps for more complex, database specific features (GIS etc) but generally it’s perfect.

By chance has anyone who's used DataGrip also used Sequel Pro snd be able to comment?

Agreed. I do recommend DBeaver to customers that want a GUI for PostgreSQL. It's better at almost everything and it handles ssh tunnels well. Even certificates.

I don't have any GUI client installed now. I ssh to servers and use psql there. I use psql locally and inside docker containers. I used pg-cli (?) years ago but I probably lost it during one of the various reinstalls (usually one for each Ubuntu LTS, I'm on Debian now) and I forgot about it.

DBeaver is powerful and better than anything else I found (except maybe datagrip), but honestly its UX is terrible. It takes a million clicks to do basic things, the "export results" functionality is a maze, "rename connection" is a different functionality from "edit connection", ctrl+tab doesn't work, it's generally very noisy visually...

I am using it on a daily basis and it's very powerful, but it shoves all the complexity at your face, it doesn't scale down. And it uses ~7% of my M1 CPU while sitting there unused, not even connected to any DB.

I also found DBeaver to be a huge improvement over tools I used earlier.

Recently I discovered Jailer which makes it very easy to navigate complex relational structures: https://github.com/Wisser/Jailer

DBeaver is nice, but Sequel Pro is hard to unsee.

postgres has some cool tools these days. postico if you are on macos or my personal fav lately has been https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/ which is also multi-db

Sequel Pro is the one I keep comparing all Postgres clients to.

Beekeper is nice but lacks some of the GUI Tools, there's no point in having a nice GUI but not any good amount of functionality.

At times I see folks new to Postgres using 2 or 3 different GUIs to do different things.

sequel pro (which afaik has not been updated since 1928?) could be compared with postico2 as far as native look and feel go - https://eggerapps.at/postico2/

never realized sequel pro was open source: https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro

Sequel Pro have been abandoned and lacks support for some newer version of databases, and there is a maintained fork here: https://github.com/Sequel-Ace/Sequel-Ace

This is great to see. I hope this kind of client can be connected to Postgres one day.

Yup, it’s crazy something unmaintained is still such a noticeably better experience than any of the Postgres clients I have seen.

The note about sequel ace below is worth noting too for anyone wanting to try it out.

Pgadmin became web based only relatively recently. The old pgadmin was ugly but functional.

I actually prefer a web-based tool. I've been using pgweb - and I add it to my Docker Compose for development work so it provides a great, simple, lightweight way to interact with the database while working on a project.

I'd definitely prefer something with a few more features, and have also been surprised there's not a lot of options. Desktop clients definitely have their use, but I like using a web-based tool that I can spin up alongside my project very easily with no config/setup.

DBeaver is an amazing gui. It works with Postgres, MySQL and many more.

MySQL WorkBench was always crashing on my Windows machine. That was some years ago so it may have improved.

You are absolutely right. The current state of pgAdmin is enfuriating. I was forced to work with it recently, and I thought after all these years maybe something happened... oh dear, how wrong I was. That app is a full-rewrite away from production level.

I mainline DataGrip. It just works.

BeeKeeper is good light alternative.

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