Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nullabillity | Hacker News Reader

> Because Microsoft makes some of the best tools for developers.

NuGet constantly fails silently when trying to restore packages.

Visual Studio is an editor built primarily around a folder tree, with no competent way to navigate that tree without constantly losing your place. It's also the only IDE that I have used where I just had to give up trying to find the application logs.

> Because sql server is a fantastic product that has basically no real equivalent on the market.

MSSQL's utter incompetence makes MySQL's `utf8` troubles look like small potatoes. For example: the `uniqueidentifier` type doesn't have a defined endianness, meaning that there is no guarantee that two languages reading the same cell will produce the same UUID string.

SSMS is an unusable hog. There is just no nice way to put it.

SQLCMD must have been designed by people who have never actually used a CLI.

View on HN

Wow, you must've been trying hard to cherry pick those.

I'm actually curious about this one:

>SSMS is an unusable hog. There is just no nice way to put it.

I've been using both postgre and sql server for like 1.5 year and tooling difference between pgAdmin and SSMS is insane

SSMS is mature, reliable and makes my life easier meanwhile pgAdmin is just viable, but nothing more.

Generally SQL Server seems to be years ahead in compare to postgre when it comes to features/tooling.

I also used mysql via xamp and sql management in compare to all of those is world class

>NuGet constantly fails silently when trying to restore packages.

what?

When you type Install-Package in Visual Studio, sometimes it just fails to find the package at all. You have to search for it first, then type Install-Package, and then it actually downloads etc.

I'm always doing it via Nuget Package Manager and I don't remember having any troubles with that

I'm using dotnet's CLI mostly for migrations/publishing

Yeah i think package manager GUI is ok? but cli and powershell, not so much

> Wow, you must've been trying hard to cherry pick those.

Not really. Just try keeping a .NET/MSSQL environment running for a few days, and the stories will build up quickly.

> SSMS is mature, reliable and makes my life easier meanwhile pgAdmin is just viable, but nothing more.

But psql is good enough that I pretty much never have to touch pgAdmin. And for ad-hoc editing (the only case where graphical editors have any real advantage), surprise, SSMS can't edit the results of custom queries. pgAdmin doesn't care, as long as the query contains the primary key.

And there is also a lot of polish that SSMS just doesn't have. Like how it forgets the order of your tabs as soon as they overflow. Or how you can't just do an ad-hoc query and see the result, you need to open a new query "document".

>> NuGet constantly fails silently when trying to restore packages.

> what?

That was my reaction too. Sometimes it decides that it won't build at all because it complains about unresolved references. Sometimes it builds but assets will be missing. And of course it's an opaque black box in the usual MS fashion, so there is no way to force it to retry, or to find out why it's not cooperating.

What about copying data between databases? I couldnt get it right in pg, meanwhile works fine in SQL Server

Also pgAdmin has no(?) Intellisense.

> What about copying data between databases? I couldnt get it right in pg, meanwhile works fine in SQL Server

Export to SQL with pg_dump[0], or export to CSV with COPY[1] or \copy[2].

> Also pgAdmin has no(?) Intellisense.

Press ctrl+space for auto-complete. It also seems to pop up when you press `.` (in a valid place).

psql follows the more typical convention of auto-completing on tab.

[0]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/app-pgdump.html

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-copy.html

[2]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-psql.html#APP-PS...

> SSMS is an unusable hog.

...huh? SSMS (plus the free Red Gate SQL Search addin) is hands-down the best DB tooling I've ever used. If you're aware of similarly full-featured equivalents for Postgres (or any other RDBMS), I'd love to hear about them.

have you tried DataGrip? I went from SSMS to DataGrip for most of my database work. SSMS is still better for management of the SQL Server instance, but for database work, DataGrip is a lot nicer than SSMS (and SSMS is a lot nicer than a LOT of other tools for other RDBMSs)

Interesting, thanks!

I have tried DataGrip briefly with Postgres – my first impression was that it's a competent tool for things that are generic across all RDBMSs, but limited in RDBMS-specific management/administration functionality. Not far off from what you said :)

If you have time, what about DataGrip do you find to be "a lot nicer than SSMS"? Which features should I (a DataGrip noob) try using?

First of all, I don't think I've personally scratched the surface of what you can do. But I use it mostly as a direct replacement of what I would have done in SSMS.

First of all Start writing queries and see how much it will help you, for the most it will autocomplete lots of things, once you are used to joins been auto written for you, hard to go back!

personal preference, but, it supports vim bindings.

Its table editor works on partial queries for updates, so you can select something and as long as you selected the key, you can do a update using the table editor. Speaking of the table editor, it is vastly superior and allows batching of changes, it shows you queries its going to do, has lots of helpers for all sorts of things including datetimes. It has lots of options to capture the table in lots of formats. It also allows across database comparisons of tables and synchronization or generation of sql scripts of differences/database changes.

Its ide is standard jetbrains ide ish and has lots editing goodness, refactoring, auto generation, surrounds, templates, local change history, lots of navigation tools ( go to references / usages etc )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com