

Show HN: TeamPostgreSQL, neat admin interface for PostgreSQL - johnyzee

I am just getting ready to release TeamPostgreSQL 1.05. You can check it out here:<p>http://www.teampostgresql.com<p>It is a web-based admin interface for PostgreSQL, with a lot of work put into making it a user-friendly and productive way to work with the database. Hopefully this makes it ideal for when different people need to access the database, including developers, testers, support staff, managers etc. This will be the first release after several months of beta testing and user feedback.<p>Some feature highlights:<p>* Pretty neat web interface (GWT powered AJAX GUI)<p>* Comprehensive database management, including database objects and tablespace management<p>* Easy yet powerful data viewing, using one-click search, relationship navigation, filtering and more<p>* Upload and download files directly to/from binary fields<p>* Tabbed SQL editor with SQL auto-completion<p>* Favorites function for easy storing/sharing of snippets and scripts<p>* Import/export of database objects and entire databases<p>I'd love to hear what you think!
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kls
Please don't take this as knocking your hard work and I like your product, but
I don't think another admin interface is not truly what the market needs.

PGAdmin does pretty well and the only significant feature that I see in your
front end over PGAdmin (in my very limited exposure to your product), is that
your product is web based. While a good feature, it is not the killer feature
that knocks the competition dead. I can easily manage my off-site Postgres
databases with PGAdmin.

To me where many of the tools that support the open databases are lacking, is
in the analytic department. This is truly the hard stuff to do in the database
world. adding features like telling me my longest running query, my most CPU
intensive query or my most memory intensive query (etc. etc.) and providing a
clean UI to display and refine (make recommendations) this information goes
along way to helping developers and pay for themselves rapidly. These features
sell themselves. Provide these in a good UI and I would definitely look at
your product given that Postgres is my turn to DB any time I have a choice.

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johnyzee
Thanks for the comments, I do appreciate the input. A couple of advantages
over pgAdmin for an offsite database is that it will not drop connections, and
it can easily be configured for SSL using https. Also, clients don't have to
install anything.

Feature-wise the focus at this point has mostly been on powerful data
navigation, i.e. you can do a quick search for a customer id, click the
reference to the purchase order table, click to download a pdf contract
directly from a binary field (just an example). The tool provides significant
time-savings for these tasks, though you may not discover this unless you
delve into the product a little.

More generally there are many little productivity improvements and details
that support the user that all add up to provide value, which may not be
noticed at a quick glance. I hope to be able to communicate these as
efficiently as possible.

Going forward there is a lot of room for the kind of analytical features you
mentioned. This is still an early version of the product with focus on core
administration tasks. In fact management of running processes is due in the
next release.

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kls
A couple of things, powerful data navigation and export to pdf from the UI are
rely nice features and they will make life easier for the end user, but in my
experience the main user of a DB admin application are developers, DBA's and
admins. Most of which are not as concerned with the actual contents of the
data, as they are with the structures of the data as well as the performance
of the data.

Developers general concern themselves with the data when they are setting up
test, or diagnosing a data related problem but in the coarse of a day most of
their focus is on the structure and performance of the data and database.

The point being, generally your call center rep or your accountant (the end
user) uses a custom interface dedicated to data navigation and data viewing
(coupled with workflow) these features will most likely not be exposed to them
and they are the users most advantaged by them, particularly the export to PDF
feature.

Again, please don't take this as knocking your hard work, I think that
powerful data navigation is important for those times that you do have to
directly manage the data and think other DB admin front ends are severely
lacking in that departments, but I urge you to keep in mind that in most
organizations almost all the end users that are interested in the actual data
are buffered away from a raw DB interface, even report writers who know SQL
fairly well are buffered with tools such as Cognos and Crystal Reports.

But I think you have the basis to cure a pain point that plagues a lot of
organizations given that you now have a good base product to build a robust
development tool on.

A portion of (software) developers do not like and look at relational
databases as second class to actually writing software. If you can mold your
tool in to providing deep analysis and diagnostics and marry that with
solution engine that provides recommendations on how to optimize and refine
the data structure and query structures so that they are more performant, more
secure, less resource intensive and you can do this in a seamless way you are
scratching an itch that a good portion of developers cant reach.

~~~
johnyzee
Again, thanks for your comments, I believe you are right. Particularly
administrators are less concerned with what is in the database than how the
database is organized and performs - for them the product does not currently
offer any particular advantages at this stage. I will seriously consider how
to better address this, given that administrators are arguably the most
obvious consumers of this kind of product.

At this point the product addresses many of my own pain points of modelling
and troubleshooting databases and data related issues from the point of view
of a developer. Test departments too will benefit a lot from these features.
As for the other groups it is true that they will mostly use a dedicated
interface, yet for the time when the occasional manager or supporter does
need/want to check out something he can. That is mostly an added benefit from
the product being (hopefully) so easy to use.

Thanks for giving me something to consider for the future direction of the
product.

By the way, the PDF example just demonstrates how the tool lets you download a
file directly from a binary field in a table row (f.ex. bytea type column). It
can be any file type, some use the database to store images, for example.
Similarly, you can upload a file from your PC directly into a binary field in
your table. It is a good example of how the tools makes an otherwise involved
task very simple.

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lazyant
Anecdote: I selected a trigger, clicked on "Generate DDL" and it just stayed
on "Generating, please wait" forever

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johnyzee
Thanks, will fix. It is actually a permission getting denied for the demo
account (there is an error message being obscured by the progress dialog).

Note that it should work fine when you run as administrator.

