pgAdmin vs. the competition

This list is kind of dead lately, it seems ripe for something to argue
about. I toyed with sending this directly to a pgAdmin list but neither
of them seemed right to derail with what is essentially a discussion of
how to address competative comparisions.

I'm now firmly in the middle of the MySQL vs. PostgreSQL flamewars at this
point, and that involves lots of suggestions for working around what
people percieve as the PG flaws. Recently I suggested to someone that if
they needed a GUI management tool, pgAdmin III was what they should try.
It's hard to get critical yet fair feedback out of people, I thought the
rsponse I got back was quite good:

"I'm writing to give a bit of feedback. Cut my teeth in MySQL via the
console many years ago, moved to msSQL's semi-good GUI and then to its
superior 2005 SQL Manager (best DB GUI admin on the market IMHO), then to
MySQL Admin which isn't bad actually. I'm currently at a PostgreSQL shop
and I'm so disspointed in pgAdmin (I'm running the newest build too).

For starters it seems to lack UI elements that have been in the GUI world
since Windows 3.11. 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. 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."

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...

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD