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Comment by prima-facie | Hacker News Reader

For anyone using postgres on a daily basis I would highly recommend pgcli. It has a very good auto-complete, and can even suggest JOIN statements (parts of it actually).

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do you find that it's significantly slower than just using psql?

Yes, in many cases (until I stopped using it), it messed up my benchmarks. I was testing some queries, and often it was: - pgserver fast, returns 10000 rows, pgcli takes time to parse -> result: total time 10s - pgserver slow, returns 1 row, pgcli instant -> result: total time 10 sec.

As we are working in efficient C/C++, our internal time to parse the query set is closer to psql than pgcli, so we tend to prefer the pgserver fast, but the benchmark using pgcli did not clearly show the best time.

Also, when you are testing a query on one machine, you have to carefully monitor the CPU usage to differentiate the CPU pegging by postgres from the one by pgcli.

All those issues were gone when I got back to standard psql.

For bench marking and optimising queries you almost certainly want `EXPLAIN ANALYZE`. That will give you what you want about what Postgres thinks and the time actually taken for the query.

Yes, sure, but executing the query a couple of times on the command line is also something I do

`EXPLAIN ANALYZE` - I read that in a Dalek's voice.

yeah this was my experience as well when I first tested pgcli a couple months back. Lots of neat features, but the differences in time to parse bugged me too much

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