Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?
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We use Postgres where I work, and I'm having a heck of a time trying to track down a certain problem, mostly because the tool the team recommended (pgAdmin) keeps crapping out on me. Crashing at the drop of a hat, dropping connections to the database, not giving an error but suddenly starting to return a 0-row result for every query, stuff like that. Again and again and again and... anyway, I'm sick of it and I need something better or I can't do my job.
I'd like to get PostgreSQL Maestro, which is excellent, but I've already used up the free trial and continuing with it requires a business license that my employer isn't likely to pay for. So are there any free PostgreSQL admin tools that are actually good?
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@masonwheeler said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
a business license that my employer isn't likely to pay for.
That's kind of a
. Unless we're talking a license that's tens of thousands of dollars here, your employer should be willing to spend money to keep you productive.I'd recommend talking to your team members to find out their experiences with pgAdmin since they're the ones who recommended it. The reason is two-pronged: If you find out they've never had any problems with it, there might be something about your configuration/network environment/etc. that's contributing to your problems and that can be resolved. On the other hand, if they're all having problems with pgAdmin too, then you can make a solid business case for how many man-hours are being lost when you consider the team as a whole and how this cost stacks up against the expense of an additional software license.
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@heterodox said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
That's kind of a
. Unless we're talking a license that's tens of thousands of dollars here, your employer should be willing to spend money to keep you productive.I definitely agree. Unfortunately, the company is large enough that there's bureaucracy involved...
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@heterodox said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
I'd recommend talking to your team members to find out their experiences with pgAdmin since they're the ones who recommended it. The reason is two-pronged: If you find out they've never had any problems with it, there might be something about your configuration/network environment/etc. that's contributing to your problems and that can be resolved. On the other hand, if they're all having problems with pgAdmin too, then you can make a solid business case for how many man-hours are being lost when you consider the team as a whole and how this cost stacks up against the expense of an additional software license.
Yeah, definitely do this. pgAdmin certainly isn't perfect when it comes to UI, but I've never had the kind of serious problems that you're describing.
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@masonwheeler said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
I definitely agree. Unfortunately, the company is large enough that there's bureaucracy involved...
... so? Is navigating that bureaucracy worse to you than having to deal with the foibles of pgAdmin you're currently dealing with? (Getting a 0-row result while an error's presumably swallowed in the background? Fuck that.)
I mean, don't get me wrong, I recognize that my tolerance for bureaucracy is higher than that of most people. But I suspect that it's not that bad compared to your current troubles. And the bureaucracy gets easier as your argument gets stronger and more focused.
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- Free
- Doesn't suck
You can only pick one.
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I just use psql.
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@heterodox said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
Is navigating that bureaucracy worse to you than having to deal with the foibles of pgAdmin
Bureaucracy can take a few months, and the answer can be "fuck you, just use pgadmin", or be asked to prove how this $0.50 tool increase ROI
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@wharrgarbl said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
Bureaucracy can take a few months, and the answer can be "fuck you, just use pgadmin", or be asked to prove how this $0.50 tool increase ROI
Then do... fucking better. That's all I have to say. If others experience the issue it's well over $0.50 ROI within seconds. Fucking do it.
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@masonwheeler What version of pgAdmin did you try and what version do your coworkers use?
pgAdmin 3 was pretty good. I've used it for years and it rarely crashes and I've never seen it drop connections or return false results.
The main complaint that I have about it is its crappy autocomplete feature that stops working if there's more than one table in the query or if there's more than one column in the where clause.pgAdmin 4 was totally rewritten as a slow and buggy mess that was missing a lot of features that 3 had.
I tried it when it first came out (last September) and it couldn't even import my existing server list from pgAdmin 3.
I tried it for a few hours and decided that I'd rather keep using the old version than try to use that new pile of
.
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@masonwheeler said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
I'd like to get PostgreSQL Maestro, which is excellent, but I've already used up the free trial and continuing with it requires a business license that my employer isn't likely to pay for. So are there any free PostgreSQL admin tools that are actually good?
I have moved to using JetBrains DataGrip for everything.
DataGrip: The Cross-Platform IDE for Databases & SQL by JetBrains
A powerful IDE from JetBrains for SQL on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Currently, it is mostly geared towards DQL and DDL kind of work. So if you need to examine or modify data, it's great. If you need to monitor active queries and debug performance, I don't think they have much to offer there for now.
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@masonwheeler said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
I'd like to get PostgreSQL Maestro, which is excellent
´https://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/postgresql/maestro/ said
PostgreSQL Maestro supports all the latest versions of PostgreSQL server
Use PostgreSQL Maestro to administer any PostgreSQL server version from 7.3 to 9.3!PostgreSQL 9.4 was released on 2014-12-18. Since that they have also released versions 9.5 and 9.6 and the beta of 10.0.
Have the Maestro people just forgotten to update their webpage for a couple of years or is that tool really that out of date?
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@julmu said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
pgAdmin 3 was pretty good. I've used it for years and it rarely crashes and I've never seen it drop connections or return false results.
The main complaint that I have about it is its crappy autocomplete feature that stops working if there's more than one table in the query or if there's more than one column in the where clause.It never crashes, unless you try to connect using SSH tunnel. Then it's a race against time to get your work done before the connection times out, making pgAdmin crash.
That entire program has zero concept of UI vs background threads. Everything is happening 100% synchronously, in the same thread.
As long as your DB connection is stable and fast, everything is cool. As soon as there is ANY problem, it's restart time.
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Although I'm not sure if it'll help the OP since it's Linux only, pgcli is a great improvement over regular psql if you're fine with CLI.
On the GUI front, you might be fscked.
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@Onyx said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
Although I'm not sure if it'll help the OP since it's Linux only, pgcli is a great improvement over regular psql if you're fine with CLI.
TIL. Looks nice.
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@julmu said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
@masonwheeler said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
I'd like to get PostgreSQL Maestro, which is excellent
´https://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/postgresql/maestro/ said
PostgreSQL Maestro supports all the latest versions of PostgreSQL server
Use PostgreSQL Maestro to administer any PostgreSQL server version from 7.3 to 9.3!PostgreSQL 9.4 was released on 2014-12-18. Since that they have also released versions 9.5 and 9.6 and the beta of 10.0.
Have the Maestro people just forgotten to update their webpage for a couple of years or is that tool really that out of date?That bullet is at least a little out of date. In the company news feed on the right had side, the first thing is this:
Jun 27, 2016
PostgreSQL Maestro 16.6 released
New version comes with PostgreSQL 9.6 compatibility, support for row-level security policies and a number of other PostgreSQL 9.5 new features, updated BLOB Editor and other useful things.The Download page says that Maestro 16.6 was Released Jun 27, 2016 and Last updated Jun 15, 2017. I have no idea what that means. Maybe a point release?
OTOH, @masonwheeler says that it was working great for him with his DB, whatever version that was.
That said, a single business license is $199 and a site license including 3 years of updates is $1699. Not trivial amounts, but still doesn't seem like that much to ask for. Though I can understand why the new guy might have to work to convince someone that he needs a different tool than what the rest of the team is actually happy with.
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@julmu said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
@masonwheeler What version of pgAdmin did you try and what version do your coworkers use?
pgAdmin 3 was pretty good. I've used it for years and it rarely crashes and I've never seen it drop connections or return false results.
The main complaint that I have about it is its crappy autocomplete feature that stops working if there's more than one table in the query or if there's more than one column in the where clause.pgAdmin 4 was totally rewritten as a slow and buggy mess that was missing a lot of features that 3 had.
I tried it when it first came out (last September) and it couldn't even import my existing server list from pgAdmin 3.
I tried it for a few hours and decided that I'd rather keep using the old version than try to use that new pile of.Oh, so version 3 is better? Is it still available? Because yeah, version 4 is a huge mess of
and glitchiness.
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@masonwheeler It's still available on the official site https://www.pgadmin.org/download/ right under the new version.
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@cartman82 said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
@julmu said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
pgAdmin 3 was pretty good. I've used it for years and it rarely crashes and I've never seen it drop connections or return false results.
The main complaint that I have about it is its crappy autocomplete feature that stops working if there's more than one table in the query or if there's more than one column in the where clause.It never crashes, unless you try to connect using SSH tunnel. Then it's a race against time to get your work done before the connection times out, making pgAdmin crash.
So, there's this thing called SSH keep-alive that you should look into.
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@ben_lubar said in Any free Postgres tools that don't suck?:
I just use psql.
Likewise.
psqlis underrated. I've used Datagrip at $WORKPLACE[-2] and PgAdmin 4 is standard issue at $WORKPLACE[-1], but beyond basic discovery,psqlis just more efficient.
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You will win big time if you start learning psql now. It looks modest but has in fact a few features that will make you productive as hell.
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dbForge Studio for PostgreSQL is released. It is a Postgres GUI tool for managing and developing databases and objects, allows to create, develop, and execute queries, edit and adjust the code to the requirements in a convenient UI.
