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Ask HN: What PostgreSQL client do you use?
There are seemingly a plethora of clients for Postgres [1].
What client(s) do HN use day-to-day? Why have you chosen it?
I'm looking for recommendations to use for light usage. Ideally, something that would help build the schema visually.
[1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Clients
- nickreese 6y agoFor visual schema building the best I’ve found is pgmodeler. It is buggy and isn’t really a client but it is great at modeling, viewing schemas in a model, and overall making sense of how complex data connects. Edit: For day-to-day I use Postico but am playing with beekeeper as soon as JSON and JSONB support are figured out.
- atonse 6y agoI use and love Postico. But I do very basic stuff (SQL, DDL, editing rows, etc)
- earthboundkid 6y agoI have enjoyed using Postico. It’s very easy to use and not ugly, which is rare in the world of database tooling.
- zippoxer 6y agoTablePlus - Love it! Cross-platform without Electron and yet still pretty. They got UX right, it's minimal yet powerful enough for me.
- adperry 6y agoI’ve been using it for a awhile. It’s great.... much better than pgadmin.
- conorh 6y agoJust discovered this recently, great app, it even replaced sequel pro which was my go to for MySQL DBs.
- jcoletti 6y agoAnother vote for TablePlus. Really solid and support for tons of other DBs. Came from Navicat which crashed a lot. Pricing is way better too. They also make DBngin, a great free tool for spinning up local DBs in a clean, self-contained way.
- zaszrespawned 6y agothey need to allow more than 2 tabs in the free version
- kmstout 6y agopsql. It's installed everywhere I need to use it, it reads from stdin, and it writes to stdout. It's often the case that I want to take a SQL query that I've developed, generalize it a bit, and use something like psql OPTIONS <<EOF SELECT ... EOF in a shell script (probably wrapped in a function for convenience).
- Justsignedup 6y agoto be fair. psql is not only available everywhere, but with a well customized .psqlrc file you can really get that tool to do what you want it to do. On rare occasions I still need a GUI tool to explore a database because GUI definitely wins during the exploration phase by a lot. Ironically enough for report writing I use metabase web ui. it serves most purposes I need from it.
- lukeschlather 6y agoWhat does your .psqlrc look like? I keep meaning to look into wrangling readline and getting history working well.
- e12e 6y agoI do use psql for scripting, but for more interactive use, pgcli is quite nice too: https://www.pgcli.com/ https://www.pgcli.com/ It doesn't help with visualizing schemas, however.
- iameoghan 6y agoOoh, that looks interesting (even though it doesn't do visual schemas as you say)
- bmdavi3 6y ago+1. Be sure to add \x auto and \timing to your ~/.psqlrc file to make the experience even better!
- Insanity 6y agoPgAdmin but I've not really looked around, it's the one I used when I learned postgres and stuck with it.
- sheeshkebab 6y agopostico is great
- tomashertus 6y agoI'm using pgAdmin4 and I'm super happy with that. For the day-to-day tasks it's a great tool!
- war1025 6y agoThey switched pgAdmin from being a native app to a webapp and it degraded the usability quite a bit in my opinion.
- sbuttgereit 6y agoI liked that pgAdmin had thorough support for the more obscure PostgreSQL features (e.g. domains). However, back in the pgAdmin III days I found it clunky, occasionally unresponsive, and just not fun to work with. With pgAdmin 4... my sense is they doubled down on that with a convoluted architecture where the "client" is a sort of front end to a web server like process they spin up.... really I just wanted a desktop client. Truth is I never found a PostgreSQL graphical tool that I was happy with. The one with best PostgreSQL support was pgAdmin and the others were all lacking in that regard. In the end I just bit the bullet and took a week to get psql into my muscle memory. Best decision ever; in combination with a good .psqlrc I rarely find myself wanting for anything more. I work with fairly complex highly normalized schemas (100s of tables) and it tells me what I need to know. Of course, I'm doing a huge amount of database work so a more casual database user may not readily be able to get as much mileage out of psql (graphical data models help for some). I think OmniDB (https://omnidb.org/ https://omnidb.org/) is a tool that seems to try to cover the same bases as pgAdmin, but doing a better job of it. I think I'd likely look there if I really needed graphical tool. For the record, the last graphical tool I used that I was very pleased with was a tool for Oracle database development PL/SQL Developer (https://www.allroundautomations.com/products/pl-sql-developer https://www.allroundautomations.com/products/pl-sql-develope...). For me, it hit a sweet spot that I've just not seen duplicated... but I stopped working with Oracle over a decade ago and that was when last I used this tool.
- oftenwrong 6y agopgcli https://www.pgcli.com/ https://www.pgcli.com/
- dataminded 6y agoI've been using aquadata for years. It's been a fairly good time. I have started to transition more of my work to datagrip because I use pycharm and it's right there.
- turrini 6y agopsql and dbeaver
- wolfgang000 6y agodbeaver It's really good and surprisingly lightweight considering it's java app.
- evo_9 6y agoMS added PostgresSQL support to their excellent cross platform dB tool Azure Data Studio: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-data-studio-an-open-source-gui-editor-for-postgres/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-data-studio-an-...
- ComputerGuru 6y ago(If anyone is wondering: it was forked from VS Code and, yes, it is electron.)
- aarpmcgee 6y agoPostico seems to be heavily optimized for the 80% of what I need in a postgres tool. I love it.
- nhumrich 6y agoDatagrip. I love the tight integration with PyCharm.
- soheilpro 6y agoMy very own pgcmd [1]. I usually pipe the output to jq [2] or catj [3] for further processing. [1] https://github.com/soheilpro/pgcmd https://github.com/soheilpro/pgcmd [2] https://stedolan.github.io/jq https://stedolan.github.io/jq [3] https://github.com/soheilpro/catj https://github.com/soheilpro/catj
- yen223 6y agoPsql when I want to do anything programmatic TablePlus when I want to do data exploration. I've heard good things from colleagues about JetBrain's DataGrip, but I haven't given it a fair go.
- rboyd 6y agoMost of these comments don't seem to cover what you're asking for, which was building the schema visually. SQLEditor (https://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/ https://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/) is quite good if you're on OS X. It'll generate entire schema or migration since last save.
- alexandernst 6y agoNavicat , it has everything I can ask from a RDBMS client (it even supports NoSQL!), from days transfer, database diffing, scheme reversing, advanced DBA related tasks...
- tren 6y agoI really enjoy using navicat too, it is much more intuitive for me coming from mssql
- 1ark 6y agoValentina Studio does the job for me.
- iamthelord 6y agoCan’t live without postico
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 6y agoDBeaver. It suffers from 'oh God this was definitely written in Java, wasn't it', but it's mostly good. Then I happened across pgAdmin recently which probably does everything I want from DBeaver, and has a docker image (it's browser based) but I haven't really tried it properly. Keep meaning to though, I have a hopeful feeling that it'd be 100% what I recommended if I had.
- lykr0n 6y agoDBeaver is great, in part because it's purely functional. The UI is straight forward and well thought out. It also supports everything.
- brightball 6y agoVery happy with DBeaver too
- bzzzt 6y agoI like some small features in DBeaver like clicking through on a foreign key takes you to that row in another table. I've seen lots of clients where you have to write another query. Written in Java has the advantage of supporting any database which supports Java (which means every serious database on the planet)
- croo 6y agoThose other little features are like you can modify and edit the resultset of a query. It won't stop for a full minute if a db connection breaks. It saves sql querys you wrote Notepad++ style without asking "ARE YOU SURE?". Its the little things that adds up and make a much better experience when coming from sqlDeveloper and PgAdmin4.
- pvsukale3 6y agoPGWeb : https://github.com/sosedoff/pgweb https://github.com/sosedoff/pgweb Web-based PostgreSQL database browser written in Go. very lite and minimal.
- iameoghan 6y agoOooh, that's very nice. Deffo adding this to my toolkit.
- ahsd1 6y agoValentine studio rocks. Free ver is sufficient.
- iameoghan 6y agoCool, will check this out!
- dahdum 6y agoI used Aqua Data Studio for years until they changed to $500/yr license. Tried using DataGrip but couldn't used to it, now I just use pgAdmin4.
- hexyoungs 6y agopgcli
- brightball 6y agoDBeaver
- nsxwolf 6y agoI use the database tool built into IntelliJ. It’s amazing. It’s available as a stand-alone product named DataGrip.
- scabbycakes 6y agoSeconded - the code integration is fantastic as well. Intellij magically complains when I'm typing a SQL query in a string and get a column name wrong and all sorts of weird little things I miss when I don't have them, IJ is unbelievable.
- Doxin 6y agoAs a pycharm user I can second that the editor integration is rad. The interface itself could use some work in my opinion. The way it deals with datetime inputs is particularly heinous. But it's definitely the least-bad GUI database client I've used so far.
- pavelevst 6y agohttps://github.com/Paxa/postbird https://github.com/Paxa/postbird
- rgoulter 6y agoI'd guess in your case ("light usage"), just choose one of the open-source GUI clients would be best. Probably DBeaver. Here's the decision-tree I'd go with: Do you want to pay money for it? If not, use a free or open source one. Are you comfortable with running SQL commands from the command line? If not, go for a GUI one. This leaves "OS-specific or cross platform" (which should be straightforward to resolve), and "desktop client or web interface". I'd expect a desktop client to be easier to setup.
- pella 6y agoFor PostGIS / Spatial data #1. DBeaver: Working with spatial/GIS data https://dbeaver.com/docs/wiki/Working-with-Spatial-GIS-data/ https://dbeaver.com/docs/wiki/Working-with-Spatial-GIS-data/ #2. pgAdmin4: now offers PostGIS geometry viewer https://www.bostongis.com/blog/index.php?/archives/272-pgAdmin4-now-offers-PostGIS-geometry-viewer.html https://www.bostongis.com/blog/index.php?/archives/272-pgAdm... --------- Any other?
- bsg75 6y agoDbVisualizer has been my main SQL “IDE” for years. https://www.dbvis.com https://www.dbvis.com
- goldfix 6y agoI suggest: https://www.sql-workbench.eu/ https://www.sql-workbench.eu/ lightweight and JDBC compatible
- alphabettsy 6y agoPostico and Pgweb
- oliwarner 6y agoDjango. It's not the answer you thought you were looking for, but it's a bloody good framework for modelling data, reporting, and also scripting things around it.
- KristiMKE 6y ago1. pgAdmin 2. DBeaver 3. Navicat 4. DataGrip 5. OmniDB This article breaks down the pros and cons, features, and pricing for each of the top PostgreSQL GUI tools: https://scalegrid.io/blog/which-is-the-best-postgresql-gui-2019-comparison/ https://scalegrid.io/blog/which-is-the-best-postgresql-gui-2...