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Comment by MagicWishMonkey | Hacker News Reader

The closest thing to SQL Server Management Studio I've found is Navicat. It's not as solid as Management Studio, and it's incredibly expensive, but it is much better than most of the other tools out there.

If you can expense the cost of the license you should definitely check it out.

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I have found DbVisualizer [1] to be a superior tool and it supports almost every database in existence, Postgres and SQL Server included.

Plus it's completely cross-platform and runs on Linux, Windows and OS X.

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

That's pretty slick, and it's much more competetively priced than Navicat.

If you are on Mac check out https://eggerapps.at/postico/

This looks pretty nice, thanks!

I've been a fan of Aqua Data Studio for years and it doesn't seem to get mentioned often. Cross platform and supports a myriad of dbs. http://www.aquafold.com/aquadatastudio.html

Agreed on Navicat. pgAdmin doesn't quite cut it just yet.

Which sometimes made me wonder if, with Postgres becoming more popular by the day, there would be a market for a management tool cheaper than Navicat.

Postgresql have such an amazing documentation and CLI that I prefer to use it over pgAdmin.

This is why I prefer postgres. Jumping into the CLI is easy and much quicker than mousing around some clustered up feature overloaded GUI.

Last I tried Navicat it didn't offer much over pgAdmin. The UI was more streamlined but that wasn't reason enough to switch to it. What features in navicat are must have and not found in pgAdmin3?

I use both Navicat and pgAdmin3 these days.

One thing I like about pgAdmin3 is the ability to only execute the query you have highlighted and also the scratchpad. It's nice for exploratory querying. In Navicat, I like switching between various tabs where pgAdmin3 makes me switch between windows.

Both have some hilarious idiosyncrasies. When one locks up for no reason, I generally just alt-tab to the other.

Recently I was using pgAdmin3 and set my production database color to red. I happened to notice that the color didn't repaint back to green when I switched to my dev database. And Navicat seems to consistently hang whenever the network dies or burps mid-action, requiring a command-line kill.

Idiosyncrasies. :)

AquaDataStudio was my choice at the time. Expensive, but worked on pretty much all the DBMS I had to use at the time (which included oracle, pg, teradata, mssql, mysql to name a few).

TOAD DBA Suite for SQL Server is nice too, very expensive though

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