Rant to the guiding lights of Postgres - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

I am evaluating Postgres for an existing Java application. I already have
the app running with Oracle ($$$) and Sybase (oooold!) and I am trying to
convince my management that it is worth going fully open source. (We already
use Java, JBoss, Eclipse etc.) But the problem I am having, and it seems I
am not alone, is the absence of Client support in postgres. I can fully
understand why the db server is Linux/Unix as this covers the majority of
servers used for enterprise applications, but I can not understand the
abscence of platform support for the client software. Where is the Mac psql,
or the Win XP version of pg_dumpall? Clients do not use Linux boxes, they
use Wintel or Mac boxes. You do not have to like it, but ignoring them
doesn't make them go away.

I do not need the fancy GUI interfaces like PGExplorer, they are nice, and
handy to port my scripts and test my stored procedures, but I can't use them
to automate the creation of my database.

Sybase had iSQL for scripts and bcp for data loading. Oracle had sqlplus and
sqlldr. These are the basic client side tools required to automate the setup
and maintence of a non-trival database, and they are available on almost any
platform you care to name.

And before anybody suggests I use Cygwin, I have used Cygwin, I do not like
it (mild understatement) and nor am I prepared to learn Tcl just to run a
script that already works. Run a script to load a telnet session to run a
script to run my script? Be serious.

Please, guys. Open source is the way to go. We need to convince accountants
that it is the sensible, safe and cheap way to develop software. But that
means we have to do our jobs! When we write client-server systems, write the
clients as well as the servers.

Can it really be that difficult to write a native mode psql? Have you
considered doing it in Java?

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