What I wish some of these projects would focus on are DBA features that only PgAdmin performs today. The market (both OSS and commercial) is filled with data editors, but none that focus on schema, user, and object management.
PgAdmin does handle these functions, but the UI can be buggy, and is subject to problems with slow network connections - forced restarts can be common.
The unfortunate reason for that is a data editor can be whacked out in a couple of weeks (well, at least an MVP).
Making object editors takes a lot more effort, especially considering all the different objects PostgreSQL has: schemas, tables view, materialized views, indices, functions, sequences, etc.
I'm struggling with this myself. I'm currently trying to add object editors to PG Commander, and it's months and months of work. I wanted to have a table structure editor in PG Commander 1.0, and now, more than a year later, I'll finally be able to deliver a basic table & view editor in version 2.0 -- you can try a prerelease here: https://eggerapps.at/pgcommander-prerelease/
In my case, I almost never edit an object in a UI, but I often view it. Sometimes in a grid (ex. table columns in a grid of type, nullability, default, etc.) or as a single view of all the DDL for the object. I don't trust UIs to edit objects, but they can make the work of creating ALTER scripts much easier.
The latter is where PgAdmin is most useful for DB objects. The DDL view not only shows me things like CREATE TABLE/VIEW/FUNCTION etc., but also shows dependent objects such as constraints, indexes, permissions in the same window. Most of the JDBC based tools do not.
Graphical explain plans can be very nice to have, along with status views that make things like pg_stat_activity easy to consume in an actively refreshing compact view.
Awesome to hear, Jakob-- I recently purchased PG Commander after a couple of months of using it, so a "free" update to 2.0 is awesome. Thanks for your hard work on the app-- it's my default PostgreSQL client.
I've always been a big fan of Sequel Pro [1] which offers all of that, but only for MySQL. I read other databases are in the works. It's also open source [2].
Thanks for your suggestions. My plan is to support most features in Sequel Pro (but for PostgreSQL of course) which do include schema and user management. This release is just a start.
I just wish PgAdmin would respond to typical OSX keyboard shortcuts when editing SQL. Pretty much only control-shift-arrow for word selecting and fn-shift-arrow for sentences is supported. If it would just support a few other basic commands (and make them the same keys as standard OSX shortcuts, or user defined) it would be a huge improvement in usability.
Because it's not a good use of time for one-off modifications. Plus, the GUI is nice for visualizing, so there's a decent chance you're spending a lot of time in there anyway.
It's possible to run a query to modify the contents of a database without changing the schema. You may already be familiar with the UPDATE statement, for instance.
And not every database in existence is part of a larger stack. I don't care much about automating a task I'll only do once in a throwaway DB that exists only on my computer.
PgAdmin does handle these functions, but the UI can be buggy, and is subject to problems with slow network connections - forced restarts can be common.