Postico: A Modern PostgreSQL Client for the Mac

I prefer the UX of TablePlus as well. As an example, I find the constraints UX in Postico to be dummed down and inefficient. That's an area where I want a very terse, straightforward, and easy to visually organize / parse display of information, and TablePlus using a grid there is far superior imho. There are other examples, but I dislike the injection of eye candy into a tool that I need to be methodical and analytical within.

I’ve been using Datagrip more, have you tried PopSQL?

I keep all my queries in Dash (but I’m also a SQL hacker in the sense of piecing it together slowly as I learn the language rather than a native) - I love tableplus, the only advantage I can see from what the splash shows is the ability to create/edit fields (and tables?) in UI, but I’m past that stage of my journey now

I use it now and miss "record view". Where I have data in rows for a particular record.

it's also actively maintained. utils like this are well worth less than an hour's pay

> Visual query builders are a deskilling device. There's a small hump to get over to learn to write SQL queries, it's worth getting over (IMO) (there are times when I'd like to take a large existing multi-way join and see a pic of it though).

Oh, I can write massively complex queries with the best of 'em, but I like visualizing the connections seeing it all out in front of me helps me. And it's not often I need this, just the few times I do it really strikes me as odd that the tools we had for this were better all those years ago. Also, it can really help explain things to new devs.

Your PoV reminds me a bit of the old GUI vs CLI flame wars :) both have merit, it's not a zero-sum game.

> The index wizard is likewise de-skilling.

This is just really a time suck for me. It's not my primary task, all I want is the DB to be better at its job so it lets me be better at mine. In companies without DBAs these tools are very useful.

To expand upon the argument of leaning into GUI tools for stuff like this, or to offer my own opinions, i really liked the functionality of MySQL Workbench.

You could design your entire schema as an ER diagram, thus being able to play around with how everything could be laid out extremely easily and also get a visual "feel" for that it'd end up being like and how your queries could work. But not just that, you could also forward engineer this ER diagram of yours to get SQL that you could apply to a live instance, or vice versa - to create an ER diagram of an existing DB instance. Not only that, but there was also the ability to synchronize schemas, with the tool essentially diffing what is there and what needs to be changed, so partial changes also become doable (e.g. adding a new table to an existing schema through the ER diagram) which was just surprisingly useful!

The migrations might (should?) still be applied by a tool of some sort and could be versioned, but being able to draw a bunch of boxes around and getting all of the DDL that you need to get 90% of the way there is pretty great! Curiously, this also lets you tackle the laziness of the developers: "But i don't want to create 5 different tables for these types of objects that are different but also seem vaguely similar at the present time, i might just do with one wide table with lots of columns because i'm lazy and data normalization be damned!"

Of course, using tools like that in some capacity probably also immensely useful for discovering larger and older DB structures and just exploring the schema rather than just writing a bunch of SELECT/DESCRIBE/... statements or something - tools like DbVis can let you visualize hundreds of tables of various DBMSes easily, as well as filter your layouts etc., which in my experience has been really useful for well architected schemas (e.g. proper foreign keys) also far less useful for badly architected ones (no foreign keys OR EAV/OTLT pattern which has more proponents than i'm okay with).

Now, i'm not saying that these tools are all that people should be using, quite on the contrary - learning a bit of everything is probably pretty nice, if you have enough time and are willing to put in the effort to explore your options! But i've also seen them not being used at all leading to some pretty bad circumstances - gradually created DB schemas where you end up needing to query 9 different tables to get some data because of no good reason, killing the usability of the DB through any tool where you want to visualize things or even want to write SQL queries because some app developer thought that going for OTLT (e.g. references like TABLE_NAME, ID_IN_TABLE, just typically also named weirdly like REF_TYPE, ENTITY_ID because they pretend they can abstract the DB away) is a good idea and didn't consider that maybe the DB should also be usable outside of a particular Java application which has bunches of enums and so on.

I've also seen DBs that perform horribly because the schema and how it's queried changed over time but nobody really looked into checking what's going on with the indices and as a consequence things perform about 100 times slower than they otherwise would, which can totally go under the radar until suddenly it's a big problem because it ends up in a critical path for some action that's done often. Thus i maintain that any solution that may assist you in creating indices, e.g. what Oracle has available (albeit i would prefer to use MariaDB/PostgreSQL in most cases) is really good and should be standard functionality for any good DBMS.

> Anyway, my experience. Don't feel pressured, do what works for you.

This is still spot on, though! Use what works for you, look for ways to make your life easier and hopefully make things perform correctly and performantly.

A very lofi solution I have been using is tbls [1]. It is a native cli utility that generates documentation from db schema (and includes comments in the db as well).

It can output in markdown with embedded svg diagrams (which is great for previewing in github) as well as yaml (which I use for generating models).

It is not quite polished but works pretty well. Also all the db diagrams and docs are committed alongside code in the repo which is a big plus for me.

[1] https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls

To document your Schema, try https://schemaspy.org/

Whilst I agree with you for writing queries, the gui tools provide some nice tools. I haven’t used postico but I regularly use sequel pro and the ease to write a query and export results via csv that non technical people might need is a great feature. I’m sure there is a way to do it in command line but for me I find it a lot easier as I’m not a db admin.

Also gui tools are really useful for visualising content in tables with a lot of columns.

Sure… go write your next application in assembler using line edit

It's feature complete, and a few thousand people are already using it. It's probably the better choice for most users. But there are still a few issues with the file editor that I want to fix before I officially release it, because I have a lot of corporate users who presumably prefer to have fewer features but more stability.

I'm using it for probably 1.5 years and never had any problems with it. I can highly recommend it. It's really stable and I reported 2 (small, cosmetic) bugs which both got fixed within a few days.

> Got any screenshots you can link? I always find mac software websites always missing them

See for yourself → https://eggerapps.at/postico2/

Some parts of the UI in Table Plus have been inspired by Postico, which is probably why it looks similar at a first glance. But the apps are different, and they have a very different focus. As far as I can tell Table Plus tries be the best client for everybody (every platform + every databases), while Postico tries to be the best client just for PostgreSQL on the Mac.

As the developer of Postico I'm probably biased, and I'm not really up to date where Table Plus is right now, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. You probably have to try both to see which of the two clicks with you.

The main difference is the support for multiple databases. Its regular updates and plugins (soon) also the best advantage IMO

Lol also had a similar thing happen. I think they auto close idle transactions now. But I'm very careful about disconnecting when done now!

In Jetbrains IDEs, when you define a data source, there is a button to make the source global. If you do that, it will be accessible across all projects.

When I run into questions like this with IDEA, there is usually an answer. If not, file an issue in their issue tracker. Seriously. They fix stuff nonstop. Sometimes it even takes years, but they eventually do it if it is a good one. They are very responsive in their tracker.

DBeaver is... ok. It think it's just kind of a cumbersome layout to render