Re: pgAdmin vs. the competition

On Sunday 30 March 2008 23:35, Tatsuo Ishii wrote:
> > I think crossplatform development doesn't help on this issue. And
> > wxWidgets seems, well, less interesting (in the UI) than Qt for example.
> >
> > > Whenever PostgreSQL is busy the UI fails to
> > > give any clue, no icon changes to a spinning hourglass, no status bar
> > > filling up, not even a mindless pop-up saying "busy...". This is
> > > painfully obvious when doing a BACKUP or RESTORE.
> >
> > For the backup/restore stuff, I don't think pgAdmin can actually do
> > something better. We heavily rely on pg_dump/pg_restore. Any other UI
> > tool would need to do the same.
> >
> > > And even when either
> > > task completes, the UI/text doesn't do much to even let me know it
> > > worked. In fact it just re-enables the buttons again, where at first
> > > I'd click them and it would try to do the backup/restore again, which
> > > really made me believe the whole operation failed."
> >
> > Which lets me think he doesn't use the latest build (1.8).
> >
> > > I forward this along not to pick on pgAdmin, which is hampered in
> > > particular by being so cross-platform which Microsoft doesn't have to
> > > worry about, but to point out this is a not particularly obvious way
> > > PostgreSQL comparisions sometimes fail. This is not even close to the
> > > first time I've heard comments about how large the distance is between
> > > pgAdmin and the SQL Manager software in particular is, just the first
> > > time I could share the report.
> > >
> > > Something to chew on for those thinking about development resource
> > > allocation...
> >
> > I completely agree on this. pgAdmin is really far far far away from SQL
> > Manager. But they have many more developers than us, and they don't have
> > to handle crossdevelopment. We need to show our differences : remote
> > configuration, Slony support, etc. Adding pgPool, pgPool-II and
> > pgBouncer support would be great and is something I would like to add as
> > soon as possible.
>
> pgpool-II provides convenient interfaces to manage pgpool-II. "PCP
> commands" is a set of commands to control pgpool-II. You could, for
> example, get status of pgool, attach/detach DB nodes etc. See
> http://pgpool.projects.postgresql.org/#reference for more details.
> Actually pgpoolAdmin(A web based pgpool-II control GUI) uses these
> commands to control pgpool-II.
>
> If you prefer to use C libraries, rather than UNIX commands, you could
> use libpcp, an C functions control pgpool-II. PCP commands actually
> are made on top of libpcp.
>
> If you have questions, please let me know or you could send questions
> on pgpool ML (http://pgfoundry.org/mail/?group_id=1000055)

Actually I always wondered why you built additional interfaces, rather than
working with the existing pgadmin and phppgadmin projects. I suspect there
might be some design issues that made it more difficult, but I'm not sure.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL