PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4. Using pgAdmin

pgAdmin4 version 1.6 is the current rendition of the tried-and-true graphical administration tool for PostgreSQL. It is a complete rewrite of the predecessor pgAdmin3. Some features of pgAdmin3 have not been ported to pgAdmin4, though they may be in the future. In this chapter we’ll focus on what’s available in pgAdmin4. Much of the functionality you will find in pgAdmin4 was present in pgAdmin3, so this discussion will be valuable even if you are still using pgAdmin3. We will also cover some popular features of pgAdmin3 not yet ported to pgAdmin4. For the rest of this chapter, we’ll simply refer to both as pgAdmin, and only make distinguishing version notes where the functionality is different.

Note

Most of the key changes thus far with pgAdmin4 compared to pgAdmin3 is that pgAdmin4 better supports the new 9.6 and 10 constructs including the ability to run in a server or desktop mode; an improved query results pane with ability to edit records and also select noncontiguous rows; and improved performance. If you are using Windows, make sure to use pgAdmin4 1.6 or above. Prior pgAdmin4 versions had performance issues on Windows when running in desktop mode.

Although pgAdmin has shortcomings, we are always encouraged by not only how quickly bugs are fixed, but also how quickly new features are added. Because the PostgreSQL developers position pgAdmin as the most commonly used graphical-administration tool for PostgreSQL and it is packaged with many binary distributions ...