Re: new user on mac - Mailing list pgsql-sql

On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 01:13 -0700, Basil Bourque wrote:
> >> I have a postgres 9.1 database up & running, no problem. Purely in
> >> terms of writing sql (ddl, dml & pg/plsql), what tools are
> >> recommended?
> >> 
> >> Coming from an Oracle world, I'm thinking of toad, sql developer, etc.
> >> 
> >> 1. psql & text editor of choice (if so, which one?)
> >> 2. navicat
> >> 3. textmate with pgedit
> >> 4. eclipse plugin
> >> 5. other?
> 
> >> +1 for pgAdmin3. If you have already used Toad, u would like to check it.
> 
> Being new to SQL (but old to other relational databases) and a Mac guy, I have found pgAdmin to work surprisingly
well.

Thanks :)

>  Surprising because I have a knack for breaking/corrupting/crashing nearly every developer tool I start using as a
newbie.

Don't we all do?

>  But pgAdmin has worked nearly flawlessly for me. It looks goofy from a Mac aesthetics perspective, but it works.

Yeah, the wxWidgets toolkit doesn't really have a native UI for every
widget, so it can look goofy in some windows.

> I may have once had an inexplicable glitch, but after restart all was well. I've only been bitten by 2 recurring
bugs:
> 
> • (Cosmetic) Changing font size for use on projectors in a meeting makes fonts bigger, but the rows of the Output
Panein a SQL window fail to grow in height.
 
> 

Yeah, someone already reported this bug. It shouldn't be hard to fix.
You can always use the mousewheel in the query tool. The new setting
will be temporary but it should work for a meeting.

> • (Serious) Tools > Server Configuration > pg_hba.conf has a nasty anti-feature. When loading a saved conf file with
incorrectsyntax (usually I forget to put the slash+number on an IP address such as 127.0.0.1/32), pgAdmin parses the
file,identifies the flaw, and chooses to ignore the rule by not displaying it. Unfortunately, pgAdmin does NOT parse
theentries when entering or saving them. So if you screw up a rule:
 
> (a) You won't realize you saved incorrect syntax. To the user, it seems the rule you entered simply vanished.
> (b) You can't fix it in pgAdmin. You'll have to gain access to the filesystem as the Postgres superuser (usually
that'sthe Unix user 'postgres'), and edit the file. This is not easy to do as a Mac GUI user.
 
> This issue has been acknowledged in the mailing lists.
> 

Yes, it was already reported and we have to fix this.

> But otherwise, pgAdmin has served me well for connecting to the Postgres server, creating databases, creating tables,
creatingcolumns, creating a few initial rows of data, editing some field values, and so on. 
 
> 

Good.

> When first starting out creating tables, I used the GUI dialogs in pgAdmin. Nowadays I take advantage of the feature
wherepgAdmin generates and shows you the SQL that would re-create the table on which you've clicked. When creating a
newtable, I copy the SQL from a similar table, paste into a text editor, and edit appropriately. Then I paste the SQL
backinto a SQL window in pgAdmin to execute.
 
> 

When you are on a PostgreSQL object, you can simply click the query tool
button, and the query tool will open with the SQL create query for this
object.

> My usual choice in text editors is TextMate, running the surprisingly productive "Zenburnesque" Fonts & Color scheme
inPreferences, where you can force the text to be interpreted as SQL without bothering to save the file by choosing
"SQL"from the popup at the window's bottom frame.
 
> 
> Other good text editors include JEdit (Java-based, free-of-cost), TextWrangler (free of cost), and BBEdit.
> http://www.jedit.org/
> http://www.textwrangler.com/products/textwrangler/
> TextWrangler's commercial big-brother BBEdit is also a popular text-editor on Mac OS X.
> http://www.textwrangler.com/products/bbedit/
> 
> Other Java-based IDEs are free-of-cost, run well on Mac OS X, and include SQL editing tools: IntelliJ, NetBeans,
Eclipse.
> 
> There are many other SQL tools that run on Mac OS X, especially the Java-based tools using JDBC. I've not tried them
yetas pgAdmin is sufficient for now.
 
> 

And we are interested in hearing about other users' feelings/reviews
about pgAdmin to make it even better. That can happen on the usual
PostgreSQL mailing lists or on the pgadmin ones.


-- 
Guillaume http://blog.guillaume.lelarge.info http://www.dalibo.com