On: PostgreSQL Rising

[davyjones]

I would really appreciate it folks can try out my free and open source GUI client for postgres: http://pgXplorer.com. It is available for Mac, Ubuntu (64) and Windows (64).

[yorhel → davyjones]

Just tried to compile from git, but the qt-psql requirement wasn't very easy to satisfy on Arch. Your Ubuntu binary worked fine.

Looks quite nice, and there certainly is a need for more PostgreSQL GUIs. Some feedback from the minute I used it:

- You don't handle bytea columns very nicely. I'd expect those to be displayed in hex or so.

- Browsing a table is very slow on tables with large columns. I was testing on a table with a ~10KiB text column.

- I personally prefer a more compact interface, having an option for smaller buttons would be a good start. :-)

(Edit: formatting)

[davyjones → yorhel]

Thanks a lot for your response!

> qt-psql requirement wasn't very easy to satisfy on Arch

Whoops! My primary dev machine is Arch. Let me fire up a clean VM and try and reproduce the problem. Are you rolled to the latest?

> - You don't handle bytea columns very nicely. I'd expect those to be displayed in hex or so.

Unfortunately, the database types to Qt types get mapped in a pretty undesirable way (for this use case atleast). For example, I do custom handling of timestamp types within reason. Let me take a look at bytea as well.

> - Browsing a table is very slow on tables with large columns. I was testing on a table with a ~10KiB text column.

I strongly suspect the Delegate class of Qt. This class handles the painting of cell data and it can be customized to a high degree. And I think even the default Delegate is pretty heavy leading to extreme stress when painting cells that carry a lot of data. Unfortunately, I don't see this as something that can be fixed quickly unless I start from very low level classes on Qt to display table data.

> - I personally prefer a more compact interface, having an option for smaller buttons would be a good start. :-)

Actually, I was thinking about having the scroll wheel adjust the icon size on toolbars. Let me look into that as well.

Thanks a lot for your input; I really appreciate it.

[yorhel → davyjones]

Oops, just actually tried to compile from git and it just worked. I was under the impression that the qt-psql library wasn't included by default, so I went looking for a package and only found something outdated on AUR[1]. At which point I gave up, expecting that to be too old to still work. Sorry for the FUD, I feel stupid now. Keep up the good work!

1. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=18709

[j_s → davyjones]

> - Browsing a table is very slow on tables with large columns.

Last time I did this I used a fixed-width column when displaying text fields. Everything built-in was able to handle things smoothly when clipping to just the first __ characters. (Of course you can't see it all then, but I've found it useful enough... and can paste a cell elsewhere to see all of it.)

[davyjones → j_s]

Thanks a ton. That is really helpful. I will see if changing to fixed width is feasible when string length is above a threshold.

[karolist → davyjones]

That looks great actually. I've recently switched to PG and use pgAdmin III, but find it too confusing with tables being hidden so deep in the tree (or maybe that's "pg way" of doing things with tables not being centric?)

[davyjones → karolist]

Thanks a lot for your kind words. If there are any specific features you would like, feel free to email me or raise an issue on the projects' github page.

By the way, pgXplorer has a quick find feature that can highlight the searched table/view/function. Hopefully, you find that useful. It is a really useful feature especially when dealing with CJK table names.