Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

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I cannot comment on every single aspect of Postgres vs MSSQL, but there are a few things I like in MSSQL that I don't believe exist in Postgres:

1) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) - the default GUI is a decent free front-end that integrates well and lets you do advanced stuff like graphically live-profile queries (live execution plans), easily setup security, build indices, setup various things like linked servers, compression, etc. Although I'm a text-editor sort of person, I don't have SQL syntax memorized for infrequent tasks like creating indices so a GUI (or an IDE) can really help productivity in these instances.

Postgres's default GUI, pgAdmin is comparatively weak, and the good ones are third-party payware.

2) Columnar indices - MSSQL has a fairly good implementation called columnstore indices, which creates a derived column-oriented data structure which speeds up analytic queries quite a bit.

3) Speed - SQL Server is very performant and optimized, and doesn't choke on very large datasets. Postgres is decent, but on my datasets it doesn't seem to be very performant.

Also, MSSQL locking is a boon and a bane. It's not the best for environments with high contention, but it is ok for most analytic database use cases. On the other hand, Postgres' MVCC (and oh the vacuuming) can be annoying.

Working with pgAdmin on a daily basis is pure torture, and the new v4 JavaScript app is just....shockingly bad.

pgAdmin is a surprisingly bad GUI for a database as good as Postgres, yet I see folks recommending it on forums and such. I don't quite understand the reasoning behind that -- I can only surmise that these folks have never used a decent SQL GUI nor experienced how a decent SQL GUI can massively increase their productivity.

I wonder if rewriting pgAdmin in Electron might help.

Others recommend using psql from the command-line. Now I spend most of my time on the command-line, and psql is great for one-off stuff, but when you have to edit, test and profile complex queries, the cmd-line interface just doesn't cut it for rapid iteration.

I think this is a huge gap in the Postgres world. But I also think that DataGrip is very promising. I have a pretty high view of Jetbrains' tools.

Rewriting it as a HTML+JS application only made it worse.

What are the good third-party payware GUIs for Postgres? I've looked and never seen any that came anywhere close to SSMS, much less SSMS + SQL Prompt combo.

I use HeidiSQL for MySQL, it seems to support Postgres.

There's Navicat.

Datagrip is on its way to becoming really good, though it still has some issues.

There's a whole list here: https://postgresapp.com/documentation/gui-tools.html

(I use the free Apex Refactor with SSMS and it makes editing SQL a pleasure)

Navicat is poor. Their buggy native linux app is horrible slow .net 2.0 app with wine loaded included, we felt scammed on that but managed to get our money back.

I've read some good reviews about the Windows version of Navicat, but I can see the Linux port being bad if it's WINE based.

JetBrains DataGrip is the best I found.

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