PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) supporting extensibility and standards-compliance. Just like any other advanced RDBMS, PostgreSQL does more than retrieving or updating data. PostgreSQL is a very popular database application there are quite many different IDE available for the same. In this article we will explore top 3 most popular development environment for PostgreSQL.
What is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)?
PostgreSQL is commonly known as Postgres. It is called as the world’s most advanced open source database. PostgreSQL, often simply "Postgres", is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) supporting extensibility and standards-compliance. As a database server, its primary function is to store data securely and retrieve it when requested by software applications.
Just like any other advanced RDBMS, PostgreSQL does more than retrieving or updating data. Here are few of the important task any database needs to perform.
- Creating Database
- Populating Database with Table and Data
- Creating User Roles and Managing Permissions
- Performance Tuning and Monitoring
- Creating and Managing various Procedures and Objects
Well, the list can be indeed a very big list but you get the fair idea about various task. There was a time when we all used to love our text based email and landline regular phones. Today the time has changed, video games are with near realistic graphics and smart phones are in every hands.
Similarly there was a time when pretty much everything was done by command prompt of command shell. Now the time has changed and many users prefer the convenience of the graphical interface over command prompt. Modern IDEs are used in the context of visual development and programming. They help to develop applications quickly by moving programming blocks. IDE also helps to compiled code and execute the code as well. PostgreSQL is a very popular database application there are quite many different IDE available for the same.
This article will cover three of the most popular IDEs.
pgAdmin III
pgAdmin III is bundled with the Windows installer. When you install PostgreSQL with windows installer, this IDE is installed by default. pgAdmin III is one of the most popular IDE for PostgreSQL as it is Open Source management tool featuring full Unicode support, fast, multithreaded query and data editing. The best part is that this tool supports all the PostgreSQL datatypes.
pgAdmin III is available on MS Windows, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, Solaris platform. It is available in more than 30 different languages and it is one of the most powerful tool to write SQL Queries and administrator complex PostgreSQL tasks.
Available from: http://www.pgadmin.org/
phpPgAdmin
phpPgAdmin is very similar tool to the most popular MySQL IDE phpPgAdmin. This particular IDE is very popular in open source development environment and it requires PHP and Apache packages installed on the machine to function.
phpPgAdmin is a fully functional web-based administration utility and supports all the basic and advanced features of PostgreSQL. It supports 27 different language and supports slony master-slave replication engine. Just like phpMyAdmin, this IDE also runs via browser.
Available from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppgadmin
SQuirreL
SQuirreL SQL Client is free as open source software. It is a database administration tool, which uses JDBC to allow application to connect with database via a JDBC driver. This particular tool supports over 60 different databases and PostgreSQL is one of them. It is available for any platform which supports JVM.
This particular tool additionally allows to do some of the complicate tasks like coping database table from one database to another database as well as listing all the keywords which are reserved in the database. SquirreL is very powerful tool and it easily integrates with PostgreSQL and all of its datatypes.
Available from: http://squirrel-sql.sourceforge.net/
Conclusion
PostgreSQL is one of the most popular open source free database. There are over 100 different IDE available to manage and develop PostgreSQL. The team at PostgreSQL has created a page with all the major IDE available on the web. You can access the list over here https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreSQL_GUI_Tools.
Next Steps
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