Invite HN: TeamPostgreSQL beta

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422149

by johnyzee • 18 years ago

21 15 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I lurk around here all the time and respect the opinion of people here a great deal. I also know that some guys here are big PostgreSQL users, making this particularly relevant to you, though non-Postgres users are also very welcome.

I would like to invite you to try out an early beta of a product I have spent the last months building: TeamPostgreSQL.

In short, the product provides very user-friendly web access to PostgreSQL databases.

It is ideal if you need to share one or more databases across a development team or a larger organization, f.ex. when testers, managers or other non-technical people need to peek in the database or even modify data, run scripts etc.

The beta is available here:

http://www.teampostgresql.com/beta.html

Currently Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu/Fedora Linux are supported, let me know if you need it for other platforms

Needless to say I will be very thankful for any feedback you are able to provide.

aneesh• 18 years ago

I can't actually try it out since I don't have a PostgreSQL installation handy, but from the (two) screenshots, it looks like a great product.

I'd suggest you put more screenshots & maybe a demo to help people like me get a better idea of what the product is about before downloading. If you can make this work with other database vendors, that will be really exciting.

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

It comes bundled with a sample database, so you can still try it out even without a PostgreSQL database available.

Also, thanks for the suggestions. I will definitely expand the website with more information - this is just an early release for a limited audience.

e1ven• 18 years ago

This looks like a very nice front-end-

Right now we're using a combination of navicat and pg_admin for administration, particularly adhoc queries for reporting, so this looks nlike a nice alternative.

I'm a little confused, however. It seems like it's a web-product (Snappy, web-based interface), but you're still offering downloads. If I were to guess, I'd imagine that the download is for the server install?

What are the requirements? Also, I know it's a nit, but if possible, it's nice if you can provide packages for the Linux platforms, rather than just a .sh script. It makes it easier to standardize do upgrades.

Do you have any estimates on release pricing?

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

Sorry for the confusion, this is definitely one of the points we should make clear.

You are right, it is a web application and the download is the web server with the webapp on it. The common use case is that you would put the server on the organization's intranet so people can access the application using their browsers.

Requirements for the server are fairly pedestrian: ~150 MB disk space, something like 200 MB free memory. All dependencies are bundled with the server so you should not have to install anything on the side.

Point taken about Linux packages, we will definitely provide them, as well as simple archive downloads.

We haven't thought about pricing yet except that we don't want it to be some super-exclusive-enterprisey offering :)

sjs382• 18 years ago

Looks very cool on first glance. I'll be sure to check it out in the (near) future. Any price estimates when it comes out of beta?

Also, offtopic: your header image links to http://www.teampostgresql.com/home.html which gives a 404.

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

Hope to hear your feedback. As I just now posted in another response we haven't settled on any price, except that it should not be some super exclusive thing for corporate whales :). Fixed the link.

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

I am getting great commentary back - I cleverly included the option to send feedback directly from the application, and then foolishly forgot to include a field for the user's email address, so I can't respond directly :)

I will try to pick up on those comments here in the thread, particularly support issues:

> When first starting up TeamPostgreSQL with the "Start TeamPostgreSQL" Windows start menu option, I am given no indication that I should connect to it with a web browser on localhost:8080. I was able to figure this out by inspecting the process, but I did not notice any information being presented to me about this previously.

Of course. We will log this in the server window when it starts up. Note that the installer should have added a desktop link which opens your browser on the right address.

> There doesn't seem to be any way to view the full text of a long column, like a varchar(255). The first bit of the text is shown, followed by an ellipsis, but I don't know how to view the rest of the data.

Right. For now you have to select the row and click the 'edit' button, that will bring up controls to view the full content of these fields. Of course this control should be available when browsing the rows - will fix that.

> I get this error: gzip: sfx_archive.tar.gz: not in gzip format

I have changed the compression of the Linux packages, hopefully that fixes this problem.

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

The exact URL to connect to when the server is running is:

http://localhost:8080/teampostgresql

tdavis• 18 years ago

Well, it's already better looking than pgAdmin III and I doubt it would make me force-quit my browser when the VPN drops like pgAdmin makes me, so... I might be motivated enough to try it. Does it go on the DB server itself, or does it matter?

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

You can put it on any server that can reach the database over the network.

asnyder• 18 years ago

We've been using postgresql for several years, and have used a wide range of tools from EMS, Navicat, PG Lightning, pgadmin, etc, and would love to provide you with some feedback, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to download and install this beta. Something like a tar.gz of the files would work fine, the ubuntu install won't work on our gentoo box, and the fedora link is down, and I try my best to avoid installing anything on my local machine. As soon as I can download something that's installable I'm sure we'll have some very valuable feedback for you.

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

I concur about the need for a simple archive for the download. Our installer creation process makes it easy to make installers for the different platforms, so we defaulted to those.

I will definitely make sure that simple archives are provided as alternatives to the installers. For now I fixed the link to the Fedora installer. (It doesn't do anything except copy a bunch of files making the case for simple archives even stronger)

xenoterracide• 18 years ago

speaking of gentoo... creating an ebuild would be a great idea, if the ebuild tests and works you can give it to us over on #funtoo or try to get it into gentoo on gentoo's bugzilla...

gmr• 18 years ago

Looks nice... What does this have that phppgadmin doesn't? I take it that this is a commercial project?

johnyzee8• 18 years ago

Thanks for the positive comment.

Good question, phppgadmin is the main competition and also the inspiration.

First of all, TeamPostgreSQL is team-oriented. This is expressed both in terms of features (ability to share SQL snippets and scripts - "hey Joe, go run the 'get latest orders' query on preproduction1") and in terms of user interface design (friendly and responsive versus heavy and complex).

This is the key to positioning it as a team platform, the fact that non-techies such as testers and support staff will feel perfectly comfortable peeking and poking the database.

Other than that we believe it is an overall incremental improvement over phppgadmin in the areas where they overlap, f.ex. with a 100% AJAX interface and a lot of productivity features such as 'quick query' (type a phrase, f.ex. a customer id and hit enter, it searches every row of every table in the database).

We hope that this will be attractive enough that people will pay for it (so yes, commercial project).

I'd love to hear your honest opinion: Is this enticing? Would you consider it over phppgadmin?

Invite HN: TeamPostgreSQL beta

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