Postgres IDE in VS Code

That seems like a really pragmatic tool, thanks for sharing it!

I'm curious, do you output triggers, store procedures, and such? Many tools seem to stop after you've defined tables, columns, and indices, but I'd love some better tooling to make use of the rest of the DB's features.

I just use a MCP server (with copilot or cline) that has a read only login to my database.

There is already a Microsoft SQL server extension for VS Code and this looks to effectively be a clone of it. After giving this a quick spin, it looks and feels the same as the SQL server extension, with the same menus, dialogs, etc. The SQL server extension I believe is what formed the basis of the now-deprecated Azure Data Studio (which was a VS code fork).

See here for the SQL server extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-mssql...

I speculate that it's because the MSSQL tools have been maintained as part of Azure Data Studio, and were in better shape.

ADS is being sunset, and I was surprised when trying to install the Postgres extension on VS Code to find that it had its last meaningful contribution 6 years ago [0]. It couldn't work on newer VS Code versions.

I use ADS with both Postgres and MSSQL, prior to this announcement, I kept using ADS because there was nothing to migrate to.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-postgresql/commits/maste...

They already have the SQL Server Management Studio[1], which seems to cover similar ground?

I'm assuming they might want to move SSMS to VSCode in time, so trying it out by covering new ground, PostgreSQL, makes sense to me.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ssms/sql-server-management...

I wish there was something similar for SQLite.

SQL server is in "cash cow mode" at this point. Investing more into tooling is unlikely to increase revenues at this stage.

The copilot integrations look sweet, as does the schema view. The MSSQL extension doesn't have those, but the rest of it looks similar to the Postgres one.

Microsoft seems to be going all in on open source over the past 10-15 years.

From a consumer perspective, we're almost all benefiting.

From a business perspective, they get unpaid help and community brownie points.

MS SQL server is a legacy system. I don't think any business would create a new database using SQL server unless, for some technical reason, they don't have any other option.

I've found Datagrip to be far and away the most impressive universal database tool. I feel like I've tried them all, and they all have a quality of having been developed by database people, rather than IDE designers. The depth of capability, extensibility, pace of improvement--I'm a very happy customer.

I don't want to poop on open source, but pgadmin and dbeaver and not even close to playing in the same league.

I work in Oracle and Datagrip saved my sanity.

In my experience most SQL developers don't care too much about tooling. In most cases someone designs the database and tables, developers don't care about databases and care mostly about tables and views, rarely about indexes. The ones that care, and need tooling, are usually called development DBAs and they are very rare. Rare enough I was never able to hire one and keep them (we don't pay enough for how rare they are).

You can also run the database tool separate (DataGrip). That's what I do.

Very Mac-oriented, and I think IntelliJ built-in DB editor has way more functions / features.

10+ year user of Postico. I will give this a try. I hope Copilot can start recognizing the schema when I use node-pg.

VS Code has had multi monitor support for a while now https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/custom-layout#_...

You can already do that. I run VS Code on multiple monitors.

Any tab called be pulled into its own window and moved to a different screen.

Even the terminal panel can be popped out into a tab or panel or window. (The UI is not obvious but once you see it you can’t unsee it)

It’s pretty cool to have the code and terminal side by side in the editor window. (Of course this was always possible with emacs)

I noticed yesterday that you can pull out a tab into its own window. It's not "natural" cross monitor, but you can place the windows on both. Not sure if that helps

Have you thought about just solving the problem with hardware? I.e. one giant 38" wide screen?

Database Client is fairly similar. I don't think it does the schema diagrams or AI stuff, but it can do notebooks. Has a shareware pricing model, free for up to three active connections. https://database-client.com/

Easily VSCode, if we're talking about developer reach. I'm not big into Microsoft stuff, but almost every 'serious' .Net developer I personally know is using Rider, so I can only assume that Visual Studio is retreating to the same space occupied by Eclipse and Netbeans, i.e. still used, but mostly only in places where change is hard.

I'm an emacs user and even I keep a copy of VSCode installed just because I occasionally have to interact with SQL Server and it's really the best way to do that on non-windows systems now that they're winding down ADS.

Monetarily, Visual Studio.

There are tons of enterprise development workflows, and plugins, that probably will never be ported into VSCode, from their .NET and COM implementations.

Now in terms of mindshare, and gateway drug into Microsoft ecosystem, definitely VSCode.

It is also the best Web IDE, for the return of timesharing development, sorry cloud.

That alone means everyone that is on Github and Azure, gets to use it as the modern version from X Windows and RDP/Citrix sessions.

Not bad, for Eclipse v2 (Enrich Gamma is one of the main architects), pity the whole Electron shell though.

it has to be VS Code by a long shot. They don't charge for it, but it serves as an enormous draw to keep people in the MS ecosphere and keeps MS in the developer game.

Visual Studio is still widely used in the games industry, being pretty much a requirement for targeting some platforms.

It is becoming common for some to use Rider primarily, but VS is still used as part of the build system.

> where you were supposed to move to Visual Studio after you became a real dev

It was never marketed like that, for the simple reason that popular VSCode languages like Python/HTML/Javascript were never well supported by regular Visual Studio, so there is no way to move to "proper" Visual Studio if you do Python/web development.

> A few years ago VsCode was marketed essentially as "Visual studio for beginners", where you were supposed to move to Visual Studio after you became a real dev,

When was that?

I think it's more that LLMs are a given percentage (let's say 30%) inaccurate in general, and the results of this inaccuracy are just more immediately obvious with SQL

UML was the late 90s! Rational Rose[0] was the glorious future of class design. Draw the diagram and let the juniors fill in the methods.

[0] affectionately Crashional Rose

Automatic Schema Visualization always miss the biggest point.

When you generate visualization, you should only show key table and key fields within the table and hide all the helper, secondary fields and tables.

In an LLM world this should be easy for LLMs to pick out key tables and fields and only display those

Just today I've been dealing with an issue trying to update an XML column because the XML I'm trying to insert was escaping the string in the update query.

But with DataGrip I could just pull the row I was interested and paste in the string from the UI.

Surely there's another workaround that wouldn't involve a UI but this made it pretty easy.

Using a UI to explore data is like looking at the picture instead of someone describing the picture with words.

We build privileged access management tools. Majority of our users do not like to use CLI. They know workbenches, pgadmin etc. at a wizard level.

In my opinion, i see that graphical editors are more product for major section of devs and admins.

I haven't used it for relational databases, but I can imagine it's useful to visualize complex relationships between tables.

You don't use it but still it's nice feature to have, isn't it?

DataGrip would be perfect if it had a community edition. As someone who connects to a database only two or three times a week, I’m not willing to pay for it.

I like that I can run this remotely with the vscode ssh extension to my remote systems. But compared to dbeaver, I miss some of the features of dbeaver. Like showing an estimate of large each table is, and seeing how many rows in the 'properties tab'. And being able to see the ERD graphics for individual tables (to show foreign keys, etc).

Also like with dbeaver that you can take the results and export them in many different formats. like directly to excel for some of my co-workers who live and die in excel.

PM on the project here - All clouds and on-prem/local/docker work great! We test those, so if you have issues, please report in the repo we'll fix them.

I assume you run cloud-sql-proxy as usual (for proper TLS and passwordless IAM authentication), and then it's just another postgresql port for you. Any tool like psql can connect to it.

I run a personal Postgres server so I'm wondering how well it does there

I am PM from the project - short answer is yes - you can connect to any Postgres endpoint. There are some Azure specific features, like EntraID supported by the extension that don't exist in other cloud providers.

DBeaver?

(prisma team member)

We're going to be rolling out Prisma Studio as a VS Code extension soon!

Figure 6 in the article shows it.

I think you are describing Xata Agent :) https://github.com/xataio/agent It watches metrics/logs, queries pg_stat_stetements for slow queries, the sends slack notification with suggestions, including indexes, but can be more varied than that.

PM on the project here - Yes! It works on any Postgres, on-prem or cloud

Dev on the project here - I'll mention that this language is due to corporate boilerplate public preview licensing. It is absolutely available and encouraged for use in commercial etc. activities. The licensing language needs to be fixed.

Can't use it for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities? Uh, this actually seems insane to me? What is it for then?

Probably a copypasta mistake?

Why would they spend money into this extension if 99% of developers can't use it?

I worry that with the threat of Cursor this will be more common now. Microsoft's business interest will prevent them from funding development work that directly benefit the popular forks (for years they probably assumed no fork could ever gain traction...).

does anyone actually think like this?

I imagine this is part of Microsoft's plan to the vscode forks: open sourcing copilot to rally developers round it, along with pushing premium closed sourced extensions, which will almost definitely be incompatible with the forks.

This is Microsoft catching up to what JetBrains has had all along (in their paid products). There's DataGrip but I was also using all these features (minus the AI stuff) in IntelliJ Ultimate and PyCharm 5+ years ago.

The main difference is that JetBrains supports a bunch of databases, not just one.

I feel like JetBrains' competing product is DataGrip, which even though I'm an Emacs user, I've happily paid for forever. I believe that if you just use the combined suite (IntelliJ?) then you get SQL completion based on your loaded database everywhere in the IDE. Something fun I accidentally learned this way is that the completion is so accurate I didn't even notice that I made a mistake in a database table I recently added. I used camelCase column names, which Postgres doesn't accept without quotes. Datagrip always added the quotes where I needed them, so I didn't notice, but it annoyed people on my team that used different database tools and they renamed them ;)

JetBrains has always done their completion / language integration differently than VSCode + LSP, but it seems to work well. My only complaint is that GoLand organizes imports differently than gopls / goimports, but my knowledge there is a few years out of date. I've worked on teams with a lot of GoLand users and nothing has really bothered me on this front recently, so they probably fixed it years ago.

   import (
      # standard libraries
      "fmt" 
      "io"

      # our stuff
      "github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/src/internal/whatever"

      # packages
      "example.com/foo/bar"
      "github.com/whatever/whatever/foo"
   )

You click on the button labeled database in the right-hand side panel.

You download Datagrip

Looks like it

That's the point of the VS Code strategy, yes.

Interesting in knowing why you think that

I've been using DataGrip for a few weeks and admit it is a nice upgrade to DBVisualizer that I've been using for 10 years. The intellisense and features like being able to select the query in the current window are big time savers for me. I'm still on a trial and not certain I'll purchase it just because things are moving so fast in this field. I feel like not having it in my VSCode Agent loop is a huge negative at this point

Few years ago PGAdmin was almost universally hated, especially in HN discussions. I think it was mostly around 3 -> 4 "upgrade". I see the sentiment has changed, although for me PGAdmin's UI is still very clunky and I avoid it if I can.

PgAdmin I think is more for working with data, I use Intellij DB editor mostly for writing complex SQL (with autocomplete, coloring, auto-formatting).

It also recognizes your regular programming code strings as SQL and can also autocomplete/highlight typos, but I don't use that, because we're using JOOQ that generates code stubs from live DB.

The longer I work in engineering the fewer windows I want open on my screen

If this is “PGAdmin, but 50% worse, but it just lives as another tab in your editor instead of another application” that is genuinely a huge win for me

Probably that’s because my day-to-day isn’t actually database administration, it’s application development where I need to be able to work with a database from time to time — so the preservation of context, however marginal, is really nice.

I love PGAdmin. For me it works very well. And then there are other tools when I need to work with schema etc. I always feel PGAdmin is an open source product that the team is most actively working on, always keep releasing fixes and updates. I don't want it in my IDE yet.

Can you setup entra authentication with PgAdmin? I'm more of a MS Sql person so I don't know, but if not the security improvement from this would be a huge improvement

it's nice to have copilot in the db admin tool. I use pgadmin every day, and it's great, but lately i have found myself wishing to have AI support in writing certain queries.

Try https://www.pgcli.com/install if you haven't already, it's a nice improvement over pure psql.

I wonder about people’s development workflows. If you are using a tool like this, how much time are you spending in the command-line (where all such tools can be interfaced)? Are most tools used wrapped in some layer like this?

Would you be interested if this extension supported all of the psql commands directly in the vscode editor?