When you’re writing and tuning Postgres queries, what visual editor is the easiest to use?

In this video, we’ll check out a few popular tools: DataGrip, DBeaver Community, and Visual Studio Code with Microsoft’s PostgreSQL extension. We’ll try a few simple tasks:

• Writing a single-table query to test autocomplete
• Writing a multi-table query to test joins
• Creating a new table
• Creating indexes on that table

That sounds like a really low bar for success, but let’s see how the tools fare.

I teach Postgres classes, and to maximize their appeal, I try to use a tool that the most students will be the most likely to use. Because of that, I tend to prefer free products over paid ones. (I did include DataGrip here because I’ve heard so many good things about it.) With that in mind, I ruled out a few products:

• DBVisualizer – the free version’s feature list says it doesn’t support auto-completing column names, doesn’t support editing or executing procedures, functions, packages, or triggers, doesn’t support editing table data, etc.
• TablePlus – no free version, starts at $99.
• pgAdmin – the kinda world standard for a free GUI, but I didn’t really want something in a web browser.