Re: \Copy and "Copy With Headers" -- every day these bug me.

On Wed, 2012-02-15 at 10:36 -0700, John Abraham wrote:
> These are two things that bug me every single day:
>
> 1) "\copy" equivalent. psql has \copy to copy from a local file. Using the JDBC driver I also often copy data into the database using the equivalent COPY .. FROM STDIN… With psycopg2 I also use COPY FROM STDIN to have the local python app feed the file to the postgres COPY command. In PGAdmin, however, to bulk load data into postgres we need to copy the CSV file to the computer where the database resides and fiddle with permissions until the database can read the file using COPY. This should be easy to implement, it wasn't hard for me to do it with both psycopg2 and with the JDBC driver, and psql has had it for years. The application (PGAdmin) needs to open the file and then feed the stream to the database COPY command as STDIN.
>

I agree that this doesn't appear difficult to implement. Some kind of an
import data menu in the table's contextual menu.

> 2) copy with headers. I use this every day on SQL Server Management Studio to select data and copy them out, then paste them into another app (usually Excel.) With PGAdmin I select and copy the data, paste them into Excel, then *manually* type the column headers.
>

If I'm correct, what you want is that, when you paste into Excel, there
would be some kind of automatic typing of columns. I don't see that as
"easy to implement" for three reasons:

1. I guess it'll be windows only, which doesn't please me.
2. I suppose they use some kind of Excel specific format, which we don't
know.
3. I don't own a copy of Excel, meaning I cannot test such a change.

> I think both of these should be easy to implement, so I hope they can be implemented.
>

Your first idea is interesting, and I agree such feature would be great.
The second one, well, anyone's free to implement it. I don't see how I
would be able to test it. Unless it also works with LibreOffice.

> [...]
> PS when I say "every single day" I mean a lot of days, probably over 250 days per year. Yes I use PGAdmin all the time and generally prefer it to SQL Server Management Studio and other similar programs. So great work everyone. There are just a couple of things...

Usually, it's the couple little things that make your life easier that
are really interesting to have. So, sure, send your wishes, I welcome
them. But a day is only 24 hours, so I need to be really picky on the
things I want to implement. But others are welcome to help.

--
Guillaume
http://blog.guillaume.lelarge.info
http://www.dalibo.com