PgAdmin 4 v8.0 | Hacker News Reader

PgAdmin 4 v8.0

pgadmin.org

69 pointssaeedesmaili31 comments

I *love* postgresql but pgadmin is a big nope. I keep hoping someday...

1. UI remains klunky/ugly AF. Beyond aesthetics, you lost me when I can't copy/paste text from the UI e.g. error messages... the new connection screen (a user's first experience) are super klunky and don't get started about setting up an SSH tunnel... crazy error messages.

2. system stats requires an extension... that's not available in AWS RDS... wtf?

3. there is no 3 - pgadmin already lost me because these things are too easy to "get right" and I'm not going to give it more time when there's lots of other tools.

pgadmin team - sorry!!!

I disagree. I use pgAdmin all the time. It is a very decent web application for doing typical admin stuff. If you need a fully powered desktop SQL integrated development environment there are surely better options out there but that's beside the point. Also, people operating inside a heterogeneous intranet infrastructure often don't have the option to install programs. But they surely have a web browser.

You know, pgAdmin seems fine to me. About on par with MySQL Workbench (that one has nice ERD features and reverse/forward engineering), maybe a bit better in regards to just messing around with SQL code. Sometimes there's even nice unexpected surprises, I think there was a visualization of geospatial data when working with PostGIS even.

That said, I haven't found the one RDBMS tool that I'd absolutely love, along the lines of the "aha" moment I got when working on large Java codebases in IntelliJ IDEA, or using VS Code for throwing something smaller together quickly, or even using GitKraken for making Git palatable, or MobaXTerm for SSH and RDP/VNC/SFTP sessions.

pgAdmin and MySQL Workbench are both okay, but not amazing (even when autocomplete isn't broken in either). DataGrip by JetBrains somehow feels a bit clunky to me. DbVis is perhaps the best one I've seen for visualization, but that's all it does well. There's also Open Jail which is great for exploring datasets... but there's no tool that does pretty much everything in a way that is satisfying and lets me fly through tasks.

I'm still glad that there are options, though. DataGrip supporting lots of different RDBMSes is already a good thing, as are the more specialized options like pgAdmin.

Have you tried DBeaver?

One thing pgAdmin 4 does very well is the geometry/geography viewer for spatial data.

Hey, you don't need to bash pgadmin that hard. I also have issues with it, but it's not really worse than that much other software.

It even seems nicer than some other software in some aspects - it can actually be surprisingly and refreshingly fast (once loaded) and interactions I don't expect to work often enough actually do (like editing displayed values).

Sure, it could be more intuitive. But it's not all that bad.

I still reach for PgAdmin for explain plains. I think the visuals are really nice and help me make sense of things. I've not seen something better.

But for everything else, jetbrains / datagrip etc is just infinitely nicer to use.

rc_dock is amazing, nice to see it being used more in the wild. I dislike it's ties with antd and other css peculiarities, but it's very solid

Why does PgAdmin have a double versioning scheme? Both 4 and v8.0 seem unusual in this context; maybe I'm too used to semver to immediately get it.

PgAdmin 4 was a complete rewrite.

That was when it went from being a decent gui app to a craptacular web app, right? Or was that v3?

Yes, it was

Could you be more specific - what's crap about it? I found it awesome that I can host it on a server similar to phpmyadmin and give out access to my staff. And the app itself is very good IMHO.

The developers have full admin access to their computers, but not the DBAs and the Business Analysts. They can't install anything on their computers. So giving them an URL to work with was a huge win.

If you want something like the old pgAdmin, try DBeaver.

Yes, all my love to DBeaver! I achieve so much better performance and productivity in that one over things like pgAdmin 4 and SQL Server Management Studio. It's a gem. <3

Can't you also give granular access to the DB itself and people connect via the GUI app? I don't see how it's different.

That's what I'm doing, but my users can't install desktop apps.

Capabilities are great, but it's not great as a desktop app. I'm constantly fighting against the UI -- the behavior of tabs for instance.

i have the same issue. it doesn't feel natural.

I haven't used v4 because last time I wanted to use an UI for managing the DB:

- It didn't have 'connect with psql' that v3 did

- It added significant overhead and connections to the DB server

- It didn't have proper windowing support (e.g. panels could easily get lost)

- Shutting it down regularly required going into process manager, rather than closing the window.

These are the issues I can remember, but I've never really looked at it since then, in '20 or '21. Maybe those issues were fixed. Probably not.

You can now get a PSQL prompt in pgAdmin:

https://www.pgadmin.org/docs/pgadmin4/8.0/psql_tool.html

> ... Administrators can enable the use of the PSQL tool in the pgAdmin configuration by setting the ENABLE_PSQL option to True; ...

I'll note that that's not at all equivalent to v3's 'connect with psql'. v3 popped open a terminal with psql for the user in a new window (thus giving an equivalent experience to 'normal' use of psql, with the user's configured terminal settings etc.), while v4 only forwards the output of a virtual terminal to their web app (thus requiring you to keep a window open, keeping v4's server running, etc.).

I can understand why they did that (with the whole 'web first' shtick), but for me it does not provide the same functionality and is thus essentially useless.

Honestly these days I just use IntelliJ for everything. It’s DB module is really good.

Wrong, v4 was a very decent rewrite. It is not crap.

It's version 8 of the complete rewrite/webification that was v4. I guess v4.8.0 would make more sense.

It's not a good UI, at least not on Mac. It's kind of clunky, confusing and slow. I don't know if there are many better free alternatives though.

There are many alternative clients:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Clients

psql and the meta commands like \d to view schema of a table, combined with your regular text editor and \i is IMO the greatest postgres UI.

I spend a lot of time there though so I can see the appeal of a gui for someone who only occasionally looks around in the db.

pgcli is also a great middleground between psql and gui

psql is good but how do you manage long multi line queries and saved collections of queries to reuse? or connections to multiple databases?

I keep queries in .sql files in git repo. I run longer queries by writing them in a file and including/running it with \i. There's also \e to open $PSQL_EDITOR.

pgadmin 4 is a shit show of what happens when does not have a properly research what you users wants, pgadmin 3 works fine, is consistent.

first start fight with install a local daemon always consuming my machine, after firewall rules issues, only for open the app.

after this is not native app, i can t simple copy and paste to excel or another app

i tried in mac, linux, windows, and all suffers this problems.

result of this, i m simple go back to psql pure and if need some fancy navigation datagrip, and forget the existence of pgadmin, it is very sad because was really care about pgadmin v3 and use for my daily driver *(

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