
PgAdmin 4 v1.0 released - sbuttgereit
https://www.pgadmin.org/
======
sinatra
I tried using and liking pgAdmin 4 beta for a few months. Even simple things
like copy-paste from clipboard using Cmd-C/V, exporting/importing data to/from
my local machine, etc were a hassle. Add to that the slow startup,
sluggishness, and poor UX. I'm happily using Valentina Studio now. A small
data point for others who may come to this thread looking for PostgreSQL GUI
tools.

~~~
ClayM
I've been using JetBrains DataGrip for my postgres needs. Been pretty good.

~~~
bdcravens
DataGrip is pretty good (used it since it was in beta), though I've found it a
bit lacking if you're wanting to do some quick imports of data. Navicat works
great however.

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laveur
I am for one disappointed its no longer a native app and that its been reduced
to a "web" app :(

~~~
landr0id
At least they didn't try to make it some node/electron application and just
let you use your browser. Using Python/HTML/JS greatly lowers the barrier to
entry for contributions when compared to C. Hopefully it means better
features/development.

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orf
I am for one excited it is available as a "web" app and are going in a new
direction.

PGadmin was functional, I'll give it that, but it paled in comparison to
MySQL's tools. If this can speed up development and make it better then I'm
all for it.

Maybe they could integrate this[1] into it?

1\. [http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-
visualization/](http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization/)

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willcodeforfoo
Really wish Sequel Pro[1] supported PostgreSQL... the issue tracking it[2] has
a ton of support but has been open for years. The developer posted it may be
available this year though!

[1]: [https://www.sequelpro.com/](https://www.sequelpro.com/) [2]:
[https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/362](https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/362)

~~~
urda
I've found PSequel [1] to be a nice alternative though!

[1] [http://www.psequel.com/](http://www.psequel.com/)

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RichieAHB
I installed this yesterday for about 10 minutes to look around. The UI (which
is the main reason for PSQL GUI!) is all over the place. I find Postico and
Postgres.app perfectly sufficient for my PSQL needs. Postico feels quite
similar to SequelPro which I used previously so perhaps there is some bias
there but I'll wait for PgAdmin to mature some more.

~~~
didip
Postico looks great. Thank you for mentioning it.

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prashnts
I run a local instance of Pgweb [1]. While not as feature packed, I find it
sufficient. As another comment notes, PgAdmin has a lot of GUI related quirks
making it awkward to use.

[1]: [https://github.com/sosedoff/pgweb](https://github.com/sosedoff/pgweb)

~~~
benologist
+1 for pgweb, it's really nicely made and nice to use.

Postico for Mac is also very nice to use:

[https://eggerapps.at/postico/](https://eggerapps.at/postico/)

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SadWebDeveloper
The day PostgreSQL had a decent development suite, that's the day PGSQL is
going to rocket, it's sad that even the freaking MySQL and SQLite have better
(free) tools.

~~~
cookiecaper
Can you expand on what you think is missing that's available for MySQL and
SQLite?

~~~
nvivo
I completely agree with SadWebDeveloper. Postgres is seriously lacking a good
UI. Or maybe another way to put it is that as someone coming from MSSQL and
MySql, it seems the "postgres people" are used to a completely different way
of work that feels odd to me.

Having worked with MSSQL for years, MS hit the right spot with Management
Studio. It's an UI focused on writing SQL, and any wizard has a "Generate SQL
for this" button. It let me write huge SQL files, save them, reopen then and
run them. When I found dbForge Studio for MySql, I felt at home. I wish
postgres had something like that.

Last week I went through ALL the GUIs in the postgres wiki page and found
nothing good. Valentina Studio and EMS are good, but not great. EMS has a lot
of features, but honestly it bothers me it cannot even use the default system
font in windows, the environment it's built to run on. It's like it's stuck in
2002.

If I could sum it up, the thing I miss the most is being able to work with
SQL. I want the first button in the toolbar to be a "New SQL Query" that opens
a huge editor that lets me write and run SQL. Not a "new database", not "new
project". Amazingly, most postgresql UIs are simply terrible at writing and
running sql.

It's like postgres uis are like the PHP of database UIs: people that like it
have no idea how bad they are, and the very few people go elsewhere to see how
much better the world is outside.

~~~
cookiecaper
I mostly use psql but I use pgadmin3 when I use a GUI (apparently now
pgadmin4, but I haven't tried the new version yet) and there's a new query
button that opens a big text window in which one can write SQL. You can press
F5 to run the query in that window, and can highlight parts of the query to
run them specifically. The output is in an adjustable-size pane with
adjustable-size columns at the bottom of the window.

I have used other database management tools. To me, it seems that pgadmin3's
New Query window behaves pretty similarly to Microsoft's New Query window.
I've used several other database GUIs (SQLyog, others) but there are none
that, IMO, are night-and-day better than pgadmin3 for my basic uses.

I definitely believe that pgadmin3's interface for adding columns to tables is
onerous, but that doesn't happen very often since MVC frameworks brought
schema definition as code into the mainstream.

~~~
SadWebDeveloper
IMHO pgadmin X is a mess... finding were the tables, indexes and views when
you first run pgadmin is dauting. Then setting permissions or properties for
tables is mostly useless since they don't work at all (most of the time you
have to get and fix the SQL generated rather than using the GUI). To this day
its still baffles me why Python developers choose PGSQL as his defacto DB
standard.

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DrPhish
I've always just used psql and found it sufficient for my needs. What am I
missing by not using a GUI/dev tool? e.g. What would I find easier, or what is
possible in the gui that is impossible or difficult from the CLI? Honest
question, no snark or CLI elitism intended

~~~
ufmace
I use CLI stuff for most things, but I've found it much easier to have 5-10
sql statements in a GUI editor that I can edit arbitrarily and run at will.
And the GUI results grid is nicer to get around for results sets of pretty
much any size. I'd kind of like it actually if somebody could make a command
line editor or Vim variant that could do that.

~~~
postila
Have you tried this? [https://github.com/ivalkeen/vim-
simpledb](https://github.com/ivalkeen/vim-simpledb)

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patates
Seems like a good place to ask:

I just want some good GUI for data entry. For querying, command line already
covers like 90% of my needs. I don't mean something like Access for postgres
or a full-fledged CMS which will mess with my beautiful, hand-crafted schema -
I need just a table view with BLOB support (like choosing a file and maybe
showing a preview if image) and foreign key support (like autocomplete).

Does anyone know a tool like this? I can pay - just need to be able to install
it on my machine.

~~~
justinclift
Are you looking for PG specific stuff, or pretty much any kind of simple
database?

If non-PG is fine, then maybe sqlitebrowser.org?

You'd want to grab the latest nightly though, as our foreign key constraint
handling needs improvement, and there is good progress with that in the
nightly builds. :)

~~~
patates
Sqlite is perfectly fine, at the very least, quite easy to to transfer the
entered data to postgres. Thank you for the suggestion, I'll look into this.

~~~
justinclift
Cool. :)

To view blobs, just keep the "Edit Database Cell" dock open (it's under the
View menu).

Any time you select a cell with an image in it, the image will be displayed in
that dock. You can just leave that dock open and keep working on stuff in the
main table area if you want.

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clessg
I'm glad that things are improving. Still very slow and kind of hard to use,
unfortunately. I recommend Postico:
[https://eggerapps.at/postico/](https://eggerapps.at/postico/)

~~~
rMBP
Seconded. Postico is very nice, atleast for my simple needs.

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bigato
You will pry pgadmin3 from my cold dead hands.

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hd4
An unexpected but very welcome surprise. I thought pgadmin3 was all we would
ever get (for an "official" admin tool). Glad Pg have made the effort to look
after developers.

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leeoniya
weird coincidence. just installed pgsql-portable 9.6.0 and tried the included
pgadmin4 on Win10 x64. very slow to start :(

will keep using the excellent
[http://www.heidisql.com/](http://www.heidisql.com/)

probably not as fully featured for serious admin tasks, but it's fast,
lightweight and works well for daily db tasks for SQLserver, mysql variants
and postgres. i encourage everyone to donate.

~~~
spapas82
Couldn't agree more! I have already donated to Heidisql - I use it for all my
Mysql and MS SQL Server needs and I totally love it. Heidiqsl is very fast,
very light, makes it easy to export (copy paste) data, write queries and
modify your table. What else could anybody want?

However I am not very keen on using it for Postgresql until that
"experimental" flag is removed.

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valevk
I'm a big fan of SQuirrel SQL. Sometimes the Java process consumes all my
memory, still had far less crashes than using any client.

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dijhrykl
What an utterly awful move. What were they thinking?

pgadmin3-1.22.1.zip: 12.7MB

pgadmin4-1.0-x86.exe: 82.5MB

First impressions:

Much, much slower to load than pgAdmin3.

>The software has the look and feel of a desktop application

No it doesn't. I don't think the person who wrote this even knows what "the
look and feel of a desktop application" means. I can tell within a second of
it starting that it's not a native application, which basically by definition
means it doesn't have "the look and feel of a desktop application". In fact, I
have no idea _what_ they are talking about when they say "the look and feel of
a desktop application." I can't detect a single thing which seems to imply any
effort in this regard. I would be genuinely interested to know what on earth
they think in pgAdmin4 has "the look and feel of a desktop application".

I open the preferences window. The preferences "window" is not a window. It's
an overlay in the main window, which cannot be moved. Context "menus" are
similar, and thus cannot exceed the bounds of the main window, which is not
how they are supposed to work. Not even the windows, beside the main window,
are real. "The look and feel of a desktop application"?

What the UI does scream is not "a desktop application", but Bootstrap.

I try to connect to a server. The tree view "+" icon for expanding a level in
the hierarchy has a loading spinner superimposed over it, which is not a
convention I recall ever seeing before. The loading spinner doesn't end. It
never becomes possible to do anything with the server. I have to restart the
programme and try again. This time it works.

When I expand the items in the tree view for the first time, the icons for the
tree view items are initially absent and flash into place, as the images are
loaded.

Compared to pgAdmin3, it's horrible and borderline unusable. It's also slower.

>...and vastly improves on pgAdmin III with updated user interface elements,
>multi-user/web deployment options, dashboards and a more modern design.

It's slower to respond. It's slower to start. It uses more resources. It's a
godforsaken web application. It is infinitely less like "a desktop
application" than pgAdmin3 because pgAdmin3, unlike pgAdmin4, _was_ a desktop
application.

There are also stupid animations, such as fade effects, which constitute
completely unnecessary delays to what should be a functional interface.

For some reason context menus sometimes open a substantial distance from the
mouse cursor.

Even for a web application, there are parts which are quite poorly styled.

If they wanted to develop a web application, fine, but why call it pgAdmin?
This is not in any meaningful sense a "pgAdmin 4". It's a completely new,
different, IMO inferior product that someone has decided to call "pgAdmin 4"
in an attempt to terminate pgAdmin3. So I reject the premise that "pgAdmin 4"
can be considered a legitimate successor to "pgAdmin 3", because it isn't.
It's something completely different, falsely purporting to be pgAdmin. If they
decided they wanted to make a web-based PostgreSQL administration tool, then
do that. If they don't want to maintain a native application anymore, they
could at least state as much and not release this product-killing copout
absurdly spun as some sort of improvement or natural successorship.

Even the authors seem to implicitly admit it's a different product, what with
the default install directory: "C:\Program Files (x86)\pgAdmin 4\v1". v1 of
v4.

~~~
elmigranto
They could've added support for HiDPI screens in pgAdmin and call it v4.
Standing ovations would be a guarantee.

But no, they opted for a full rewrite with messy bowl of jQuery UI plugins and
second-long animations.

~~~
sbuttgereit
I think they needed something like a re-write; pgAdmin III was not good but
did have a few features which just didn't exist the same way elsewhere... but
this was not the re-write they were looking for.

I don't really use pgAdmin anymore (psql for the win) but, was hoping that
this would be nice: it's not. Apparently my experience is mirrored by many
others (I wanted to see if it was just me or not)... oh well.

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okket
Unsigned macOS binary :(

~~~
justinclift
Spoke to the project lead about this earlier today.

They'd hit a problem where signing wasn't working, which turned out to be
because the framework bundles inside the .app were in an older format. The
bundled OSX "codesign" util was just barfing.

Gave them a working shell script to fix the problem, which they'll probably
adjust / clean up + add to their build process.

So, next releases shouldn't have this issue. :)

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Hates_
Navicat Essentials is still my fav PG GUI
[https://www.navicat.com/products/navicat-
essentials#mac](https://www.navicat.com/products/navicat-essentials#mac)

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callesgg
Cool that have moved over to the web, still miss the graphical relations view
that i love from phpmyadmin.

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mifreewil
All I want to know is does the desktop version finally have tabs for separate
queries?

~~~
dsego
It's all one version now. The desktop version is just a wrapper showing the
web UI written in Python and Javascript/jQuery.

