Thanks all. I'd tried pgadmin3 and perhaps moved on too quickly. On 2nd look it's better than I'd initially considered.
Cheers, Scott On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:13 AM, Basil Bourque <basil.l...@me.com> wrote: >>> I have a postgres 9.1 database up & running, no problem. Purely in >>> terms of writing sql (ddl, dml & pg/plsql), what tools are >>> recommended? >>> >>> Coming from an Oracle world, I'm thinking of toad, sql developer, etc. >>> >>> 1. psql & text editor of choice (if so, which one?) >>> 2. navicat >>> 3. textmate with pgedit >>> 4. eclipse plugin >>> 5. other? > >>> +1 for pgAdmin3. If you have already used Toad, u would like to check it. > > Being new to SQL (but old to other relational databases) and a Mac guy, I > have found pgAdmin to work surprisingly well. Surprising because I have a > knack for breaking/corrupting/crashing nearly every developer tool I start > using as a newbie. But pgAdmin has worked nearly flawlessly for me. It looks > goofy from a Mac aesthetics perspective, but it works. > > I may have once had an inexplicable glitch, but after restart all was well. > I've only been bitten by 2 recurring bugs: > > • (Cosmetic) Changing font size for use on projectors in a meeting makes > fonts bigger, but the rows of the Output Pane in a SQL window fail to grow in > height. > > • (Serious) Tools > Server Configuration > pg_hba.conf has a nasty > anti-feature. When loading a saved conf file with incorrect syntax (usually I > forget to put the slash+number on an IP address such as 127.0.0.1/32), > pgAdmin parses the file, identifies the flaw, and chooses to ignore the rule > by not displaying it. Unfortunately, pgAdmin does NOT parse the entries when > entering or saving them. So if you screw up a rule: > (a) You won't realize you saved incorrect syntax. To the user, it seems the > rule you entered simply vanished. > (b) You can't fix it in pgAdmin. You'll have to gain access to the filesystem > as the Postgres superuser (usually that's the Unix user 'postgres'), and edit > the file. This is not easy to do as a Mac GUI user. > This issue has been acknowledged in the mailing lists. > > But otherwise, pgAdmin has served me well for connecting to the Postgres > server, creating databases, creating tables, creating columns, creating a few > initial rows of data, editing some field values, and so on. > > When first starting out creating tables, I used the GUI dialogs in pgAdmin. > Nowadays I take advantage of the feature where pgAdmin generates and shows > you the SQL that would re-create the table on which you've clicked. When > creating a new table, I copy the SQL from a similar table, paste into a text > editor, and edit appropriately. Then I paste the SQL back into a SQL window > in pgAdmin to execute. > > My usual choice in text editors is TextMate, running the surprisingly > productive "Zenburnesque" Fonts & Color scheme in Preferences, where you can > force the text to be interpreted as SQL without bothering to save the file by > choosing "SQL" from the popup at the window's bottom frame. > > Other good text editors include JEdit (Java-based, free-of-cost), > TextWrangler (free of cost), and BBEdit. > http://www.jedit.org/ > http://www.textwrangler.com/products/textwrangler/ > TextWrangler's commercial big-brother BBEdit is also a popular text-editor on > Mac OS X. > http://www.textwrangler.com/products/bbedit/ > > Other Java-based IDEs are free-of-cost, run well on Mac OS X, and include SQL > editing tools: IntelliJ, NetBeans, Eclipse. > > There are many other SQL tools that run on Mac OS X, especially the > Java-based tools using JDBC. I've not tried them yet as pgAdmin is sufficient > for now. > > == Caution == > > I'm not too clear on Postgres' defaults when installing Postgres, and when > creating a new database. But I believe Postgres defaults to a character set > appropriate to the platform. I explicitly choose UTF-8 for both, rather than > depend on some mysterious default. The docs are not clear about this, so I'm > not sure about the best course of action. > > Other than this character set issue, one tip I've learned from experts is to > trust the default settings of both Postgres and pgAdmin. > > == Another Caution == > > Most text editors and IDEs on the Mac, both native and Java, have a tendency > to default: > > • The character set to MacRoman. > You may want to change the default to UTF-8. > > • The newline/end-of-line to CarriageReturn. > You may want to change the default to Linefeed for the Unix convention. > > Note that some tools do not change the character-set or newline of an > existing file, or require that you choose a menu item to make the change > happen. > > --Basil Bourque > -- > Sent via pgsql-sql mailing list (pgsql-sql@postgresql.org) > To make changes to your subscription: > http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-sql > -- Sent via pgsql-sql mailing list (pgsql-sql@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-sql
