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Let me guess: proprietary, like Pylance, and unavailable in VSCodium?
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Not to worry, we can surely assume Microsoft will act in good faith.
Very nice and long awaited. Thanks Ms. There are basic features available now (visualisations and query). Looking ahead for more, such table/data editing etc.
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.

Nice that they’ve got it working so well with copilot, the only thing keeping me from buying a premium sub is that they don’t bundle GitHub copilot with office copilot.

It seems like all their copilots are seperate subs, which seems like a missed opportunity honestly.

Looks amazing- and the point they're making in the article is correct. Switching back and forth from VS to PG Admin creates friction that this seems to solve in a much nicer way
Oh woah this looks great.

Quite amazing they put the effort into this for Postgres instead of SQL Server. The demand must be a lot higher.

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 built the postgres plugin in a way that nobody could usefully contribute to unless they worked at msft - like the rest of ADS the level of control they tried to maintain meant nobody wanted to work on it.
That is seemingly true of a bunch of tools. I am using an official Microsoft Python library - the repo is public on GitHub, but all of the CI or other backend integration is behind the Microsoft curtain, so it is impossible for the public to actually participate. The cherry on top is that the team that used to support the tool was impacted, so now nobody can maintain the thing.
I am curious: Which library?
The SQL Server driver for Django. Originally maintained by someone from Nebraska, Microsoft then took ownership of the project (now lives under the Microsoft GH organization). The last commit was 11 months ago. Has not supported a current release of Django for over a year now. There are almost certainly security implications for sticking on the now deprecated Django 5.0. The issues are begging for anyone at Microsoft to do something. Several pull requests sitting there with the ostensibly required updates to make it compatible with the latest Django LTS.

You can find workarounds, but it is an awful situation. Now the community is probably going to have to re-fork the library back to the public for maintenance.

I am clearly not a bean counter, but if Microsoft wants its database to win against the free options, they could do their best to ensure popular libraries can seamlessly connect.

https://github.com/microsoft/mssql-django/issues/418#issueco...

Microsoft also loves to sideline some author so some PM can say "look at this OSS project we now control!!!!" and then add controls and processes that nobody gets to even know about except for MSFT and then weird, inevitably a few years later its just a disaster area.
You’re right—the old PostgreSQL extension was outdated. The team recently forked our modern MSSQL extension (I’m the Lead PM) to build a new one for PostgreSQL. It’s a fresh start, built on the same foundation we’re actively improving.

We’re still working on bringing over some Azure Data Studio features to the VS Code extension, especially around import/export (like flat file and DACPAC). I’d love to hear what else you think is missing.

If you’re interested, here’s our open roadmap: https://aka.ms/vscode-mssql-roadmap

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...

But it's only for Windows
In my experience, MSSQL shops are far more likely to be using Windows already than PGSQL shops, so that's just yet another reason for why PGSQL was a good first choice for a VSCode plugin IMHO.
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No, it has a different purpose; VS Code extension and the former ADS are targeted for development, while SSMS is for server and database administration. I am a heavy user of SSMS and can do everything I ever need there, I don't use the VS Code extension for MS SQL even if I have it installed and I use VS Code quite a lot. This is because I am also acting as a backup and supervisor for our DBA team, so I am involved in DBA work.
SSMS is also for Development, I've been using it for that for 20 years
Same here, much better than the VS tooling for SQL Server, including all the Transact-SQL support.
I still miss the tool it replaced, SQL Query Analyzer/Profiler. To this day it's my favourite SQL 'IDE'.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2005...

Those features/tools are still part of SSMS today.
Yeah, it's specifically the old applications I miss.

They were really well designed, incredibly snappy and responsive. When SSMS was launched it was really slow and clunky on my computer.

I switched to Postgres around that time so I'm 20 years out of touch at this point.

I had forgotten about query analyzer, didn't it exist alongside ssms? I think I used to roll it out when things got really serious
Query Analyzer was eventually superseded by SSMS but there was an overlap period IIRC.
I agree, I work on an application with a lot of business logic in SQL and SSMS ends up being my primary development IDE because of that.
Lead PM for SQL in VS Code here. I’m glad to hear SSMS is working well for you! I’d love to better understand why VS Code doesn’t meet your needs in the same way.

We’re actively working to improve the experience, and learning what works for you in SSMS would be incredibly valuable.

I just said what Microsoft is targeting the tools for, not how they can be used.
SSMS is what my nightmares are made of
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.
Lead PM for MSSQL extension in VS Code here. I’m glad to share that we have both features (Schema Designer, GitHub Copilot) into the MSSQL extension for VS Code. You can check out this end-to-end demo showcasing those capabilities: https://aka.ms/vscode-mssql-copilot-demo

As I’ve mentioned in a few other threads, the PostgreSQL team recently forked our MSSQL extension to kick off a fresh implementation for Postgres. It’s built on the same foundation we’re actively improving and evolving for both extensions.

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...

Since most databases expose similar schema views it shouldn't be too complicated. Feels like JetBrains has been doing this for a long time
That’s correct—I’m the lead PM for the SQL extension in Visual Studio Code. We’ve been working closely with the PostgreSQL team; in fact, their extension is essentially a fork of ours, as you pointed out correctly.

Just to clarify on the Azure Data Studio (ADS) point: the MSSQL extension includes many of the core features from ADS, but our strategy is slightly different and focused on a modern, developer-first experience.

Here’s the link to our open roadmap—would love to hear your thoughts: https://aka.ms/vscode-mssql-roadmap

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SQL server is in "cash cow mode" at this point. Investing more into tooling is unlikely to increase revenues at this stage.
I can think of several improvements for Transact-SQL, starting with stored procedure packages.
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.
Legal, compliance, high performance, and familiarity are all valid reasons. (I'm actually not a fan, but less opposed now that it can run on Linux)
There is a parallel world, called enterprise. The enterprise people in this world, like enterprise software. They were born to be enterprise oriented. This is fine. Not everyone is like you and it's ok to use a robust product like MSSQL.
SQL Server is technically very, very good.

But they charge you an arm and a leg for the pleasure, but it can be worthwhile for enterprise.

I spent the early part of my career in MSSQL and the current part in Pg.

MSSQL is extremely, extremely capable as a database engine.

But it also costs an arm and a leg. People who haven't used it don't know just how capable it is.

The Express Edition is a SQL database engine with some limitations on CPU count and memory and missing SQL agent. It is free. I installed the version 2017 on some servers 7 years ago and they still run some supplier portal on it, that team was too lazy to even upgrade to newer versions.
I have worked with multiple ex-SQL Server engine devs and holy shit are they good.
SQL Server is very good, while cheaper than Oracle. This is a good selling point for enterprises that care about cost (or are too cheap).
Why not Postgresql??? It is fre and the best.
SQL Server, like Oracle, is technically fantastic. They were both ahead of Postgres for a long time and many people would argue they still are.

The reason people don't use them more often is that they're not free or even inexpensive.

I mean they should be, they backed by huge corporation

plus they can take notes from Open source DB like postgress and improve their system better

The MS SQL Server engine is an improvement over the years of a branch that was always more technically advanced than Postgres. I don't think there is anything to steal from it.
You have it backwards. FOSS projects are still currently learning from SQL Server and Oracle. That may change in the next 5-10 years as Postgres has already become the lingua franca of the DB world.
>MS SQL server is a legacy system

that's every SQL server out there included Postgres. Is NoSQL considered as none-legacy?

Azure SQL Database for a long while has been the most cost-effective way of running SQL Server as a PaaS database, and still is if you choose the DTU-based modes, making it a very attractive option. Combined with the rich feature set and maturity and reliability of SQL Server, it is hardly legacy; in fact it's very capable and continues to get new updates like vector operations.

I've helped create apps that support millions to hundreds of millions of revenue on Azure SQL Databases that cost at most a few hundred dollars per month. And you can get started with a S0 database for $15/mo which is absolutely suitable for production use for simple apps.

Unfortunately, I think Microsoft realized how good of a value the DTU-based model was, and has started pushing everyone to the vCore model, which dramatically increases the barrier to entry for Azure SQL Database, making PostgreSQL a much more attractive option. If Microsoft ever kills off the DTU purchasing model of Azure SQL Database, I likely won't be recommending or choosing Azure SQL Database at all going forward. It'll 100% be PostgreSQL.

Yeah, I remember that option - basic tier of DTU DB with 250GB of storage - free for one year, then continue for $15/m.

When the client brought some 3rd party expert and he advised rewriting to MySQL, I quickly did the math and it was like $60/m, without a free year.

We continued with DTU MSSQL with Prisma ORM and never regreted.

SQL Server and Oracle are as actual as ever, regardless of the hate they get on FOSS circles.
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.

Also, given that they recently bought github, they have financial incentive to keep people there, who might upgrade to pro accounts or grow to need enterprise.
> going all in on open source over the past 10-15 years.

Given that there are many Microsoft closed source extensions for VS Code, that cannot legally be used with the open source Version of VS Code, I would say they are not going all in. Knee deep maybe.

Because of the closed extensions situation, the open source part feels insincere. Sort of like a free plan up to 10 users and then pretty expensive situation. The purpose isn't the free plan, it's just an advertising measure to get people to where you really benefit eventually.
You're mixing up ideas.

Microsoft isn't "sincere" because it's just a business doing what businesses do, making money. They're not trying to be altruistic or principled. They're just doing business.

But I have personally benefited from this deal by having TypeScript and VS Code at my disposal.

I don't believe that all business is "just business". You have tobacco companies and Purdue Pharma on one end of the spectrum and, let's say, Mozilla Corporation and Valve (debatable but I think they're cool) on the other end. And, of course, large companies are kinda many different entities, really. Microsoft has a long history of dishonest behavior, some of it pretty sophisticated and with a long-term view. That makes it very hard to trust them, generally. Why is part of VS Code not FOSS anyway?
> Microsoft has a long history of dishonest behavior

Can you point out such recent behavior that isn't just echoing other peoples opinions from the anti-trust case from over two decades ago? It's been my experience that many people seem to "borrow" their opinion about Microsoft from things they've read rather than personal experience so we keep getting the same low-effort criticism ad nauseam.

VSCode's marketing was that it is an open source editor you could rely upon, complete with open source extensions for popular languages like Python. Then when once it became popular and vscodium was growing in popularity (a vscode fork), MS locked things down. Now the Python extensions are closed source, and MS has artificially prevented vscode forks from using those extensions. A bait and switch if I've ever seen one.
> VSCode's marketing

Point to this marketing. Here's the blog announcement on the 1.0 releases - what I can't find are any examples of Microsoft over-promising.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160422123116/https://code.visu...

> MS locked things down... and MS has artificially prevented vscode forks from using those extensions

Or like any growing and maturing project they established boundaries - one of which was that the plugin marketplace was proprietary, which is a perfectly reasonable position. Their existing and continued contributions to vscode are significant, so I think they can be allowed to keep some cards up their sleeves like the plugin marketplace or their Python extension. I'm just flabbergasted at this idea that somehow we're entitled to everything vscode-adjacent "just because", or that Microsoft is obligated to subsidize other billion-dollar business by giving them free features for their vscode forks.

> A bait and switch if I've ever seen one.

Where's the bait? Where's the switch? If the best you have is that they released a closed source plugin I'm going to bucket this as another borrowed opinion.

> Their existing and continued contributions to vscode are significant, so I think they can be allowed to keep some cards up their sleeves like the plugin marketplace or their Python extension.

It would have been fine if MS had started with their Python extension being proprietary, that would have been up front and transparent. Instead, they lured folks in (no small part due to open source), and once it became popular, they started turning the screws and making things proprietary and locking it down.

> I'm just flabbergasted at this idea that somehow we're entitled to everything vscode-adjacent "just because"

You're not arguing in good faith at this point. I don't think it is unreasonable to ask someone to make their intentions known up front do you? Instead MS waited until vscode became popular (partly because everything was open source) and then altering the deal Vader style closing off parts of vscode and extensions that were open. That doesn't feel particularly transparent.

> or that Microsoft is obligated to subsidize other billion-dollar business by giving them free features for their vscode forks.

I have no idea what you're talking about here. Vscodium is an entirely free and open source fork, no one makes any money from it afaik.

> Where's the bait? Where's the switch? If the best you have is that they released a closed source plugin I'm going to bucket this as another borrowed opinion.

They released the Python stack as fully open source. Then released the proprietary one, deprecating the open source one. Then made double certain that vscodium or any of the other forks could not use it at all, even if the use manually downloaded the extension. How is that not a bait and switch?

> It would have been fine if MS had started with their Python extension being proprietary

Except that never happened. Pyright was released first and was and continues to be open source. Pylance was built on Pyright but has never been open source. No promises or commitments were made otherwise. Deprecating the open source Python Language Server in favor of Pylance is also a perfectly reasonable and valid decision - the community was more than welcome to continue maintaining it, but most people I know continue to rely on Pylance.

> Instead, they lured folks in

Saying this doesn't make it true.

> Instead, they lured folks in (no small part due to open source), and once it became popular, they started turning the screws and making things proprietary and locking it down.

Microsoft has not once backtracked on anything vscode-related that's been open sourced. Trying to villianize them for not making everything open source is an argument with no legs.

> I don't think it is unreasonable to ask someone to make their intentions known up front do you?

They have. Point me to a single actual example of Microsoft operating in bad faith, that isn't them deciding to keep some parts of the ecosystem proprietary while 99% remains FOSS.

> Vscodium is an entirely free and open source fork

Microsoft and the vscode team is not making long-term decisions with vscodium in mind. But they are probably worried about Windsurf and Cursor, the latter of which (a billion-dollar company) was caught violating MS's TOS around the plugin ecosystem.

Microsoft has spent over a decade investing in, curating, and improving the vscode first-party plugin ecosystem and being a rather good steward. I think they're perfectly reasonable in keeping it to themselves. Creators are free to upload their plugins to any alternative marketplace. I don't see any arguments being made that can diminish the open source contribution they've made with code - oss just because parts of the branded vscode are proprietary.

> They released the Python stack as fully open source.

Again, no they didn't. Pyright open source. Pylance always closed source. PLS deprecated. But you're entitled to what you borrowed.

> Pyright was released first and was and continues to be open source. Pylance was built on Pyright but has never been open source.

No, the first Python extension that shipped with vscode 1.0 in 2016 was called the "Microsoft Python Language Server" and was based on the Jedi LSP. Below is the deprecation announcement of the Jedi language server in the Pylance launch post below.

> In the short-term, you will still be able to use the Microsoft Python Language Server as your choice of language server when writing Python in Visual Studio Code. > Our long-term plan is to transition our Microsoft Python Language Server users over to Pylance and eventually deprecate and remove the old language server as a supported option. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/announcing-pylance-fas...

> But they are probably worried about Windsurf and Cursor, the latter of which (a billion-dollar company) was caught violating MS's TOS around the plugin ecosystem.

If that were so, I would certainly understand. However, MS started closing vscode and the extensions years before Windsurf and Cursor (initial release in 2023). This was their business model all along get adoption in partly by leveraging the open source community, and then close things off slowly once they have a choke hold (similar to Android/AOSP). I could scarcely agree more that Windserf and Cursor are supremely sketchy and generally scummy companies.

Consider MS launch announcement that focuses on open source, extensibility, open community, and a promise to be transparent with their intentions (i.e., vision) and roadmap...

> From the beginning, we’ve striven to be as open as possible in our roadmap and vision for VS Code, and in November, we took that a step further by open-sourcing VS Code and adding the ability for anyone to make it better through submitting issues and feedback, making pull requests, or creating extensions.

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/04/14/vscode-1.0/#_...

Except they weren't open and did a u-turn on the community a few years later. MS started closing sources and locked things down a few years later despite touting the benefits of being open and open source in the announcement above. Now they have architected the Python extension so it only runs on vscode, and will not run at all on any fork, which is pretty shady after promising transparency and openness.

You forgot to quote this important part:

> The new, free language server

Pylance isn't the same extension as what was originally shipped, it's an entirely different product. Your link backs up my argument, not yours. Releasing an open source project doesn't not obligate them to continue supporting that project indefinitely, and the decision to migrate to a closed-source plugin is a perfectly valid and reasonable decision. Disagreeing with it doesn't mean they've somehow magically violated some implicit obligation you think they owe "the community".

> MS started closing vscode and the extensions years

They never "started". The plugin marketplace and vscode - the proprietary version of "Code - OSS" - has always been proprietary and closed. At no point did they give you something and take it away. Deciding to release a closed-source replacement for an open-source tool is not the same thing, and it's bad faith to argue otherwise to fit your fundamentally flawed argument.

> This was their business model all along get adoption in partly by leveraging the open source community

>Consider MS launch announcement that focuses on open source, extensibility, open community

You're relying on hand-wavy assertions without any evidence to back it up.

> Except they weren't open and did a u-turn on the community a few years later.

Where's the u-turn? I don't see anything in this post that's not true in 2025. Microsoft offers a curated plugin marketplace that's proprietary to vscode, and they provide distribution and hosting for free without requiring anything from creators and users. Pylance continues to be free but closed, Code - OSS continues to be FOSS, vscode continues to be a proprietary version of Code - OSS, plugin authors continue to upload products free-of-charge, and users continue to benefit from that community that Microsoft has fostered.

They've firmly established what their role is in this relationship. There's never been ambiguity between what's vscode closed-source and what's code - oss, unless you've not put in the effort to find out.

Point to an actual, concrete example of where they've acted in bad faith, did a "u-turn", or reneged on a public statement rather than hand-wavy generalizations. It's on you if you've relied on second-hand HN comments and news headlines to build your opinion, and relying on misunderstanding of context isn't a convincing argument.

If eight years is recent enough, Microsoft moved its German office to Munich and got the city of Munich to shut down its Linux migration in return. Not exactly dishonest, but a power move to destroy the competition that I happen to be rooting for.

Personal experience is irrelevant if the facts are not in doubt. One of these is that Microsoft was a pretty bad actor when nobody reigned them in, and I was around at the time.

How can this be described as anything other than business? Local governments making concessions to businesses generating jobs and SALT is par for the course and Microsoft isn't special here.

> One of these is that Microsoft was a pretty bad actor when nobody reigned them in, and I was around at the time.

So was I (was working in Redmond at the time), and their behavior was no worse than what Apple or Google are up to today. The anti-trust case itself was 90% theater, Microsoft was let off with a slap on the wrist but somehow popular culture has decided it was much more devastating than it really was because it reinforces their "M$ bad" bias. It's hard for me not to chalk comments like this to the "borrowed" bucket rather than researched and well-informed opinion, and it just convinces me further than when it comes to Microsoft people are borrowing their opinions rather than earning them.

Yes, Microsoft made some dick moves over 25 years ago and paid for it. They continue to operate like every other business in 2025 despite being the largest company in the world by market cap. At some point folks can't keep pulling up this card like it's a wildcard-win-all.

It's a huge public company, it doesn't deserve sympathy. I don't trust them, for which I have reasons past and current, and I don't need to, there is no moral obligation. Won't anybody think of the poor highest valued company in the world?
It's not about "thinking of the poor company". It's about lazy low-effort, low-quality comments from people that are sharing their "opinions" that are really just regurgitated interpretations from other low-quality comments. Turtles all the way down.
I recently called this (and other Microsoft behavior) out as being "fake" open source. The comment was highly controversial with quite a battle of up and down votes - so clearly not everyone agrees.

In my opinion, Microsoft wants the good vibes and PR that comes with open source, but they don't actually want to be open source. Its why many people still don't trust them in this arena.

Regarding fake open source, WSL2 comes to mind. It is entirely useless that it's open source except in one way, people can help Microsoft to replace Linux with Windows - for free.
At least they are making windows so bad that the incentive to go the other way around with Linux and wine looks better by the day. I personally made the transition last year. I have been playing with Linux since late 90s with dual boot, vms, wsl etc. But Linux never stuck as my main driver. I still don’t love it, but they managed to make me hate the windows experience so much that it feels natural to switch. I also have Mac, which I am using less and less for some other unidentified reason. Probably, that experience has degraded too but in more subtle ways.
Like Android for example?

Yes, Microsoft has an history, yet it isn't as if there is any big corporation doing full open source across all their products, the large majority only does the part that somehow brings good vibes, cuts down their own R&D costs, or is a kind of suble way to find out about possible new employees.

As most of the big corps contributing to open source.
And most of us are invested in MSFT, so we benefit that way as well. (I don't hold any positions)
I'm a developer advocate at Microsoft, and from my perspective, both teams have been putting in a bunch of effort improving their extensions. I participated in usability studies with both the teams behind the SQL Server extension and new PostgreSQL extension, and then once they were ready, I participated in bug bashes.

Both teams seem to very much want developers to enjoy their tools, so please do send them feedback on what you need out of the tools.

Follow Carlos Robles if you want SQL server extension news: https://www.linkedin.com/in/croblesm/

Follow Joshua Johnson for PostgreSQL server extension news: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsonjoshuae/

The problem customers have with these Shiny New Things that Microsoft keeps trying get us to switch to is that they drop features and entire product suites on the floor, even those that aren't officially deprecated and have no equivalent replacements. It's common to see SSRS, SSIS, SSAS in multidimensional mode, etc... simply forgotten about like they no longer exist.

Not to mention that SQL "SDK-style" projects only work properly in VS Code, so Visual Studio users are left out in the cold having to deal with an incomplete, half-baked solution.

I totally agree and I beg you to consider this feedback if you are reading @pamelafox.

The biggest problem with the usability of Microsoft products today is short-sighted thinking. New features, platforms, frameworks etc are launched and then forgotten about just a few years later with no effort to tie into the groundwork of what came before.

You might think this is only a problem for old customers who are already accustomed to the old technologies, but that's not true: it burdens new customers too. There's a few reasons for this that I can think of.

1) It's hard for new customers to know what technologies they should be reaching for in what situations when there's so many different choices.

2) It's hard to find the right documentation for the technology you've picked because you have to browse through a ton of out-of-date documentation that wrongly refers to the deprecated technologies and it's not clear what the current recommendations are.

3) The new stuff is often built without consideration for the ways of thinking that the underlying platform was built with. Thus, you end up with weird idiosyncrasies as you move from one technology to another, which make it hard to learn and hard to use.

4) When you replace the old technologies you lose the benefit of community knowledge on platforms like Stack Overflow, you lose the ability to look at existing open-source projects for guidance, etc. You are basically going into uncharted territory where there are no clearly established patterns in the wild.

So, even new users coming on to your platform suffer from these deficits. That's not to say I don't appreciate all the work on these new powerful technologies like VS Code and .NET Platform and so on, but I think a more long-sighted vision for these products would go a long way. And it's not just a matter of looking forward, since you never know what's going to happen in the future with a product as organizational priorities change. It's also a matter of looking backwards at what came before, at what groundwork was laid by previous efforts, and how it can be best taken advantage of and re-used for future efforts. That is the biggest missing piece at Microsoft today in my opinion.

Thanks for sharing this thoughtful feedback.I’d be happy to connect you with the PM leading that area, so your insights can be heard directly—feel free to reach out if you’re interested.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and we can go from there: https://www.linkedin.com/in/croblesm/

No problem, thank you for reading it. I'm not sure I have much else constructive to add beyond that. Thank you for your work on this and good luck.
Thanks for your feedback! I’m a PM on the SQL Experiences team, and if you’re open to it, I’d be happy to connect you with the PM leading the SSDT (VS) effort.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and we can go from there: https://www.linkedin.com/in/croblesm/

are we gonna get for sqlite ?
I think this extension is going to focus on PostgreSQL only. For SQLite, try the SQLTools extension.
Thank you so much, Pamela! You’ve been an amazing and key partner in our journey—your feedback and support have truly made a difference.
> Quite amazing they put the effort into this for Postgres instead of SQL Server.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

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I still think Jetbrains has the gold standard in IDE - Database interaction
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Interesting in knowing why you think that
It even lints your SQL queries written in other languages. Truly gold standard.
And autocompletes, syntax highlight it. I couldn't imagine being without this.
Datagrip, as an extension, lets you work with SQL, highlighting, autocompletion, and more, inside non-SQL files, such as your programming language files. I think they call this 'language injection'.
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
> [...] all without ever leaving your favorite code editor.

That's cool. How do I get this into JetBrains IDEs?

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.

> 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.

Yes, Intellj will recognize that the string in my code is an SQL statement and use auto complete and validation when it is connected to a database.

I've looked at the announcement and it seems that the functionality of Jetbrains is similar.

Out of curiosity: how do you set up your CI checks (linter, formatting) if the opensource tools behave differently from JetBrains'? Do you use Qodana[0]?

One benefit of using VSCode/Sublime Text/vim/emacs language integrations is that I roughly know what command to run to get the same results in the terminal as I get in the editor. With JetBrains does-it--all IDEs, I have no clue.

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/qodana/getting-started.html

As far as I went with linting this sort of thing was to check that "gofmt -s" yields the code that's checked in. https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/blob/master/src/inter...

It does not care if the imports are organized differently. I like to do:

   import (
      # standard libraries
      "fmt" 
      "io"

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

      # packages
      "example.com/foo/bar"
      "github.com/whatever/whatever/foo"
   )
People/tools will remove the newlines or mix in local packages with upstream packages, and I decided not to care. I'm pretty sure nobody else cares.
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.

Microsoft has had official Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Storage, CosmosDB and more extensions for VS Code for a long while now. The surprise is building an official branded Postgres extension rather than leaving that to all the (many) third party and/or open source extensions. I suppose it is a nice side-effect of "AI all the things" efforts that "GitHub Copilot support" was enough reason to grab resources for a postgres query editor and other tools.

(I thought it was particularly nice when you could install most to the VS Code DB extensions standalone as "Azure Data Studio"; you can build separate VS Code profiles for your coding and DBA hats of course, but it's not quite the same feel as launching a separate, dedicated application. Though "Azure Data Studio" was often overlooked because it worked just fine on non-Azure hosted databases.)

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You click on the button labeled database in the right-hand side panel.
Biggest thing that JetBrains has over VSCode for me was their very clean built in database tooling
You can also run the database tool separate (DataGrip). That's what I do.
I didn't know about DataGrip. Looks cool.
Every year or so I try to go back to VSCode but I can’t get past how good the git and database integrations are in JetBrains.
I think Code has fine git integration, but they way they implement it is just very Microsoft. The UI is very much like the one they use in their professional Visual Studio UI, and whether that's a good thing or not is definitely a very personal choice.

I much prefer JB's git integration, but I wouldn't discount it just because the UI is so completely different.

will definitely be taking a look at this. i started my career on mostly SQL Server and using SSMS fits my brain like a glove. i've been so dissatisfied with the typical options (pgadmin, dbeaver, datagrip, etc) for managing/querying postgres since i started using it probably like 10 years ago. postgres itself is great (don't get it twisted either, SQL Server is fantastic. just costs money) but i never understood why there wasn't more uproar in the community about its DBMS tooling ecosystem
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.

Are there any features in datagrip in particular that you like that aren't in dbeaver?
More streamlined UI. I find the graph viewer to display some things nicer, like coloring tables, bringing in related tables. Slightly better introspection and code formatting. Easier refactoring capabilities. Easier to get IdeaVim working then whatever Ecplise plugin is needed in DBeaver.

In my experience, DataGrip has been easier to get up and running out of the box and bringing the big IDE guns than DBeaver but DBeaver also does done this really well. For example I have never been able to setup DG with Access but DBeaver works pretty good out of the box with that garbage. Also it's free.

Both are solid

I used DBeaver (community edition) before Datagrip and I would have to give the nod to datagrip overall. I wouldn't have even tried it if I did not have the etbrains all product pack. DBeaver is great, don't get me wrong, but Datagrip just seems a lot more polished overall and the settings and the UI just seem more intuitive to me.
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I'd love to try datagrip, what are some advantages over pgadmin or others?
This is going to be subjective, but the interface is better, especially if you're used to other jetbrain products. I haven't used pgAdmin for a while, but I remember the autocomplete being clunky to use and, quite frankly, quite bad.

My company had some leftover Datagrip licences, and it felt like moving from notepad to an IDE. I haven't looked back since.

With Datagrip, you get all the niceties of a JetBrains IDE: massive customization, numerous plugins (e.g. IdeaVim, GitHub Copilot), lots of documentation. But you also get support for countless Db engines - I haven't seen anything yet which wasn't supported. The only one that was half-baked was Redis support, but it's not exactly a Db, either. Most importantly, it's that the UI doesn't feel clunky, unlike with PgAdmin. Everything feels streamlined and 1 or 2 clicks away, at most.
I doubt any new hotness could tear me away from Datagrip. I've used loads of database admin UIs over the years, and Datagrip is by far the most impressive.
Many people love Datagrip because it's got the polish and style of Jetbrains' other products. Others hate it and much prefer the more classic designs of DBeaver or the browser UI of PGAdmin.

I think it's worth downloading the 30 day trial and giving it a quick whirl. The people who dislike it seem to get hesitant quite quickly, so I doubt you'd need more than a day to decide if it's for you or not. There are all kinds of cool and fancy plugins you can set up, but I wouldn't bother with that if you decide the UX just isn't for you.

It supports quite literally every database I've thrown at it, which is pretty nice.

The way it support projects is also rather useful to me as a developer. Most SQL tools seem to be focused on being an interface first and maybe having a few SQL files open second, but Datagrip's basis as an IDE makes it very easy to maintain collections of scripts (version migrations etc).

That said, I'm not sure if the 99 bucks (a year if you want updates, though you get a perpetual license for the current version) is worth it. I use it because it's part of Jetbrains' all products pack, which I paid to use other IDEs, essentially giving me Datagrip for free. If you're not already a Jetbrains customer you could definitely give it a go, but the value per dollar it provides is very different.

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).
I've been in that camp for much of my career, and yes, tooling matters.

As you suggest however, tooling for that workload is pretty rare. I want something that focuses on enhancing the database development experience: that understands that there are development workflows for database code which are well controlled and rigorous. So many database tools are focused on being system administrative aids first, or giving you features for directly interacting and <ack> altering the running state of the database and its server from the tool.

The best tool I found for what I do was targeted at Oracle: Allround Automation's PL/SQL Developer (https://www.allroundautomations.com/products/pl-sql-develope...). It's a development oriented tool that, at least last I used it, was focused on serious development work rather than administrative work. Now, I haven't used it in almost 20 years when last I did Oracle development... but I haven't found anything for PostgreSQL that has that thoughtfully implemented database developer centric feature set.

Today I muddle through with DataGrip. DataGrip has just enough of what I need that it's marginally better to work with than just a simple text editor... and also narrowly avoids some misfeatures as not to negate it's utility.

All true.

I loved workgroup style app development. R:Base, Access, dBase, FoxPro. Then I switched to UI work for a stretch.

Circling back to back-end work, naive me embraced Hibernate (2004?), assuming it'd be familiar and good.

I was wrong.

Now that I have a lot of free time, I'm finally recreating the workgroup style experience, for the general dev population. Sort of.

Using Hibernate, our workflow became: rough in some ORM hack, capture the generated SQL, use SQL Query Analyzer and Toad to make it work (and performant), coerce Hibernate to regenerate the SQL we want. Totally backwards, right?

Eventually we gave up and just used HQL.

At that point, why even bother with ORM?

So I created a "SQL first" workflow. Treat your SQL (DML) as source code, use those explicit queries to generate the prepared statements (and typesafe DAOs, DTOs, etc). In other words, auto-generate all the things you'd do yourself, if only you had more time.

I used my tool for years. Am currently making it usable for other devs. eg Spent last week making my grammar for MySQL "good enough" for initial release. Already have PostgreSQL and SQLite, plus my original turrible "poor mans SQL" grammar (comparable SQL-92). Which I'll cull once I have "good enough" T-SQL and PL/SQL grammars.

Any way. Thanks for reading.

I only meant to confirm your experience with development DBAs. The only such person I was able to retain was near retirement and was tired of the hustle.

Hmmm, interesting. I used Datagrip for some years, now DBeaver (as I don't have a JB subscription anymore). Datagrip was and probably still is very powerful with top intellisense. Now I'm using DBeaver and it's very solid. Ok, I'm not spending my whole day in it, but when I need it, it does the job well.
I'm sure nobody cares, but I just independently stumbled upon this an hour ago and wondered why more people haven't used it.
It has a proprietary license[0]. That makes it a non-starter. Too bad: it looks nifty!

> The software is licensed, not sold. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you will not (and have no right to):[…] d) use the software for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities

Oops. Better not install this on your work laptop!

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-ossdata.vscode...

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...).
I suspect you're right. And thus came the end of the era of free VSCode.
Microsoft owns shares of Cursor through OpenAI
Can't use it for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities? Uh, this actually seems insane to me? What is it for then?
My initial reaction is "entrapment".

Edit: That's uncharitable of me. I strongly doubt that's the plan. But it genuinely was the first thing that came to mind.

I'm sure these restrictions will lift once it's out of preview. They have a huge Postgres hosting business in Azure that couldn't benefit from this if it's restricted to non-commercial.
> PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE. The software is a pre-release version. It may not operate correctly. It may be different from the commercially released version.
I assume that restriction is due to the public preview status. But yeah MS really ought to at least allow businesses to evaluate it for potential subsequent use after preview.
> Can't use it for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities? Uh, this actually seems insane to me? What is it for then?

Its a public preview, for which Microsoft probably does not wish to accept non-disclaimable liabilities for defects when used in those circumstances.

It is for previewing. By people who are interested in what is in the pipeline for a more general release.

> non-disclaimable liabilities

So you are saying that MIT/ISC/GPL/Apache2 and all the other OSS licenses do open you up to liabilites?

I am saying being a merchant in the field of software and supply software opens you up to liabilities, and saying “Not my responsibility” does not, in most jurisdictions, actially completely shield you from all of them, correct.

This may also, to a lesser extent, be true of people who are not merchants in the field of the product supplied.

It’s not the license creating the liability, in either case.

So you are saying that the parts of for example MIT or similar licenses that in clear terms say:

"THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."

do not constitute something that frees you from those liabilities?

Cause if so I think basically most of open-source would just shut down tomorrow.

I'm with you on this one. Consider all the GPL'ed software that IBM distributes via Red Hat.
This doesn't make sense to me. They could just say the software is provided as-is and Microsoft holds no liability. Which they do say elsewhere. This license goes much farther to say Microsoft can sue you if you use it.
> This doesn't make sense to me. They could just say the software is provided as-is and Microsoft holds no liability.

You cannot effectively disclaim certain liability for uses of a product you supply, even with an as-is presentation (exactly what liability depends on jurisdiction and often other context). Merely claiming to have no liability does not make it so (what it will usually do is disclaim all yhe liability you can disclaim, except for particular liabilities that may require separate explicit specific waivers to be effective.)

OTOH, if the product you provide is a software license that doesn't cover specific uses, using the software for the excluded uses may not be seen as a use of the product provided at all, and may not trigger the non-disclaimable liabilities, and even it doesn't avoid those liabilities, in the event someone sues over them, it also enabled the product supplier to countersue for infringement damages and mitigate the liabilities.

Probably a copypasta mistake?

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

Maybe, but darned if I'm going to be the one to take the legal risk of installing it.
I'm willing to put good money that MS is not going to sue anyone for using this
I am extremely doubtful that they would. And yet, using it under that license is taking the legal risk that they'll act kindly even though they have the right, under the license, to be jerks about it.

Is MS going to be a jerk about it? Almost certainly not. Could they if they wanted to? Sure seems like it.

Because most people will use it without reading the license, giving them the upper hand when they might needed it? Might sound a but harsh, but we're talking about Microsoft.
Is there a single example of MS doing something like this in the last 10 years?
VS Code forks like Cursor that use their extensions?
That's not precisely a developer using the extension...
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.
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"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Huh, I'm not sure I said anything like the above.
It's in the same general space, no?

If it helps at all, there's also this: "Assume good faith" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not to belabor the point too much, but assuming good faith is different from trusting anonymous advice from people claiming to be official advocates that could do real damage to your company if legal wanted to bone you.

Yes they are a new user, but they appear to have made the account just to make that comment.

but they appear to have made the account just to make that comment

People making accounts so they can talk about their work is one of the best reasons for people to make an account and a big part of what makes HN threads interesting.

people claiming to be official advocates that could do real damage to your company if legal wanted to bone you.

That seems like the opposite of assuming good faith.

> People making accounts so they can talk about their work is one of the best reasons for people to make an account and a big part of what makes HN threads interesting.

Uhuh but coming in to give bad legal advice as your first comment for the benefit of the largest most litigious corp on the planet, is that what makes HN threads interesting?

> That seems like the opposite of assuming good faith.

That wasn't a statement towards the individual. That was a statement of what could befall someone who took their advice.

It's not legal advice. People can just be wrong and you can tell them you think that without coming off as a jerk.

That wasn't a statement towards the individual. That was a statement of what could befall someone who took their advice.

No, I don't think that's true - it's just a catastrophizing rationalization for reflexive dickishness. We all suffer from reflexive dickishness so of course it happens and it's not that big of a deal but trying to pass it off as some sort of virtue is a mistake.

Please don't harangue new users as soon as they show up to HN. Whatever legitimate point you have is drowned out by the atmosphere of hostility you create.

Not only that but it damages the reputation of this community.

You (<-- I don't mean you personally, but all of us) should be welcoming to new users and assume good faith, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There's no reason why you can't make your substantive points while doing so. (Edit: you needn't look far for a good example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074135.)

It might also be good to remember that everyone makes mistakes, that project launches don't always go perfectly, and that HN is for discussing the interesting aspects of a submission.

I didn't mean it to be haranguing, but OP was giving what amounted to legal advice that was actually wrong and dangerous. I do think that needs to be called out and clarified—not as a personal attack on OP but just as a matter of safety for readers.

I'll acknowledge that kstrauser may have done a better job of sounding friendly about it, but I don't think my question was out of line nor even particularly aggressive given the circumstances.

OP was giving what amounted to legal advice

That is a huge overstatement that you can't really use to justify the haranguing. They just popped in to address the potential issue and let people know they're trying to sort it out. Nobody is giving legal advice and nobody is going to end up in legal trouble because Microsoft messed up their license boilerplate for a bit.

I'm sorry to press the point, but I don't think you're correctly assessing the impact of comments like your GP post, especially on a legit new user like lossyrob.

You may not have meant to be haranguing, but intent doesn't communicate itself—at least not in the tiny textblobs which are all we have here. It has to be included in the message.

When I look at your comment from that point of view, I notice that it leads with a hostile personal trope ("You do recognize...?"), followed by a putdown of everything this team is probably hoping for ("no one should use this"), followed by a personal attack ("you shouldn't be encouraging"), followed by a pedantic hammer-blow ("legally the license is the license") that takes the spotlight away from anything new or exciting about their work. That is followed by a sentence that basically shames them for what was obviously just an oversight. How is a newcomer (or anyone, for that matter) supposed to feel when they encounter that?

You're a good HN member and I'm sure you didn't intend to condemn or humiliate anyone. The problem is that people routinely underestimate the provocation in their own comments and overestimate the provocation in others'. If the error is 10x in each direction, that's a huge skew [1]. That's why it's hard to track the impact that one's posts have—especially the righteously indignant sort of post [2].

I suppose one of the moderators' jobs is to step in and try to articulate that explicitly, in the hope of persuading enough users to generate a bit of a system correction.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] which, by the way, I can feel a bit of in my own comment just now, and I'm probably underestimating it too.

That's good to know! Right now it's pretty much illegal for anyone to use it in the situations most people would want to use it for. Any idea what the eventual license will be?
We're working the details out right now, but the change will make it clear that the extension has a free license without restrictions. Stay tuned!
You're a dev on the project and consider yourself authorized to speak on behalf of the project, on a legal matter, on Hacker News.

Are you authorized to do the same on a blog hosted on microsoft.com? A lot of people would treat that as authoritative even if bigger enterprises will wait for the shrink-wrap to be updated.

Solid point. That would be a "promissory estoppel" defense if MS changed their mind and decided to run amok with this.

Good: "Your honor, here's a copy of their official blog where they said the license terms are a temporary glitch but that we're fully allowed and encouraged to use the product."

Not good: "Your honor, an anonymous new account on Hacker News said it's totally fine to use this even though the license forbids it."

I'd cheerfully take my chances with the former. The latter? Not so much.

(As mentioned elsewhere, I don't for a second think MS is going to track me down and sue me for using this against the terms of the license. I'd feel a whole lot better if someone officially put that in writing, though.)

Not an MS fan, but you guys rock for making VS Code, really changed software development for me. Especially combined with good language servers (Redhat for Java, intelliphense for PHP, Clangd for C/C++, and some python stuff). Yay! Sure, Eclipse could do it, but things like search, which I do a 1000 times a day, really benefits from good UI design choices. It simply speeds up the work massively.
The blog has been updated, see the section "Feedback and Support".
does anyone actually think like this?
Anyone who works in risk management and/or threat modeling for a living does.
thats such a small percentage of people
There aren't that many doctors, either, as a percentage of the population, but if they tell you not to eat paint, you might consider their opinion.
I go further than that and say screw Microsoft's partially open source stuff. Because VS Code isn't fully FOSS, which is a bit weird, isn't it.
Are you insinuating that the way the majority thinks is more correct and should be preferred?
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I notice your very important post, arguably the most important, has been buried under piles of fawning. Were you downvoted from a higher score?
I use DataGrip, but only for very simple tasks and only against PG and occasionally SQLite and it has always felt like way overkill for me (and it's a heavy app). This will be a more convenient option!
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.
Yeah I already have the all-products pack for Goland, Clion, and Resharper, I wouldn't have purchased DataGrip separately
Yeah same. As great as Datagrip is, I would have stuck with DBeaver if I didn't have the All Products Pack.
You don't need to buy DataGrip to get all the same functionality. It's built-in in every paid IDE as Database Tools plugin
try galaxy instead ;) getgalaxy.io
Beekeeper for small stuff, that's my rule. However, I feel this may start to change that for me.

Data grip for big serious stuff.

Doesn't look like there's much beyond what's currently possible in DataGrip yet (which is far beyond any other SQL client I've used), but nice to see a competitor in the space - especially one that will push JetBrains on the AI assistance side of things.
Nice. The few db managers I’ve tried in VS Code are so awkward, creating files for queries and opening multiple panes that barely fit in the crowded IDE space

It makes me wish for something like phpmyadmin or adminer

Isn't that exactly what pgadmin is?

https://www.pgadmin.org/

Nice, thank you! Might spin up a docker with it to keep running :)

I guess not everything needs to live inside my IDE

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Looks promising, but I'll probably stick to `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?
There’s a lot of developers that are scared of the command-line. Truth is you don’t really need these IDEs if you truly know SQL and your database, writing queries isn’t difficult. Keeping a file with common queries isn’t hard either. But most developers just keep a very shallow pool of knowledge and lean into ORMs etc.
I am very comfortable in the command line and still work with databases in IDEA. It gives you:

— autocompletion for everything — table/function names, types; very helpful on projects with hundreds to thousands of tables

— navigation ("jump to referenced table", "find foreign keys to this column", etc)

— data export in two dozen formats (configurable)

— exactly the same UI for working with 30 database engines (or however many it supports, I'm too lazy to count). Especially helpful with databases that have atrocious CLI clients, like Oracle.

— a nice tree-structured view of your database; or you can generate a (possibly vector) diagram for the rare case when that helps

— high quality autoformatter that works for every SQL dialect it supports, and in the same way

— minor things like the ability to extract a subquery with a couple of key presses, or rename a table alias

Probably something else I'm forgetting.

Saving a couple of keystrokes when writing SQL has little to do with it.

I'm using CLIs like A LOT, but still would be happy to get _good_ autocomplete for SQL.

`psql` is pretty bad at it and in `\e` you will just end up in an editor, which will probably don't know about your schema.

I've tried many tools, but seems like I like DataGrip (or databases in PyCharm Professional) the most, so I use EAP from time to time, when I'm going to write a lot of SQL.

Hm, is there a psql extension to augment the CLI and provide better autocomplete, maybe even interface with LLM? And then it just stores whatever metadata (like queries you want to save) in its own tables...
I’m really surprised that some rabid rustacean or something hasn’t written an entirely new and aesthetic CLI replacement for psql with all the modern comforts. Autocomplete menus, graphic icons, colors, etc…
Exactly, unleash the crabs.
I spend most of my time in the command line:

- neovim for file editing,

- zsh (+zoxide) for navigation / file management,

- plain git to manage my repos,

- plain text note taking and accounting, etc.

Would you be interested if this extension supported all of the psql commands directly in the vscode editor?
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I wonder what is the most "valuable" IDE right now for MS. 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, but since then VSCode has been growing and growing and stands now as the most used "IDE", where Visual Studio is mostly seen as "legacy" (oversimplification, great IDE for CPP and .NET but still...).
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.
That's ironic since I develop most of my Microsoft related tech with JetBrains products and only use vs code for frontend/node - non Microsoft stuff.
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.

How is VSCode a "gateway drug" into the MS ecosystem? It's good PR, for sure, but it has little to no conceptual/GUI overlap with, say, Windows.

FWIW I use it via Linux .deb and integrate with a private GitLab.

Azure and GitHub are large Microsoft revenue sources. Both have first-class VSC integration.
Worrying about Windows is fighting the last war.

Azure, Github, CoPilot, .NET (why do you think it is cross-platform), Java (yes, MS is back in Java land, they were the ones with initial ARM support), Go (they have their own FIPS compliant distro), Python (although with layoffs maybe not anymore), Rust, npm, Powershell, Powerapps, 365 AddIns, Teams plugins, clang/cmake (part of Visual Studio installer), Azure Linux, Sphere OS,....

Because it opens the gate up to the rest of Microsoft tools.

Once you're gonna play with azure, GitHub, vsc, you're bit by bit invested in the ecosystem and opening the wallet for that other feature or integration.

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

Also the best webdev IDE.

VS Code is a downgrade from open source to freeware. At least the C++ plugin is freeware. And they block access to the extension store from any fork (self-compiling VS code is also considered a fork). So if you are an OSS purist, VS is bad. Other than that it's effing great.
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.

I only use Rider because it's cross-platform. It's not inherently better (or worse) than Visual Studio with Resharper installed.
it's fasterb and has a functional vim interface
Most .Net devs I know use VS, I used Rider because it’s so much less awful.
I work at a mostly .NET firm and almost all the developers on that side of things are on Visual Studio. Rider has less penetration than PyCharm has among the Python devs.
> 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?

Yeah I’ve been using it since it was released and can’t ever remember it being marketed as such.
Yeah I only really saw vscode as a "let's capture atom and sublime users, bevause they will not use Visual Studio anyway" approach.
I wont likely find the video but I remember watching the PM for both VSCode and VS (at the time was the same one, not sure now) recommending people to move to Visual Studio "eventually". I clearly remember it because it didn't make any sense, even if the names were similar there were/are nothing alike UI-wise and supported-language-wise. I said few years ago but it was prob around 8 years ago, vsc was still pretty young.
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.

VS could do web okay 5 years ago, haven't run it since.
It still does when Web == .NET Web, and way better than VSCode at it.
Super cool for them to finally add in VSCode. My team is trying to build even more here by building a dedicated SQL editor with a context aware AI copilot, and with sharing and collaboration so we don’t need to send queries in slack anymore :)

Check it out and get on the waitlist getgalaxy.io/explore/product-tour

happy to chat live with anyone if interested, support@getgalaxy.io

Your whole comment history seems to be spamming for your app.

Not a good way to generate potential user interest or generally good feelings towards it.

Just saying.

I agree, I immediately felt that their product was cheapened for me. The only other "newish" developer tool I used were Beekeeper and Bruno and that too only because there were a lot of users naturally shilling for them (like I am now) on HN.
The GIF on your landing page is very jarring, with the constant zooming in and out. Way too fast to read what you're zooming into.
Postico has always been my defacto way to interact with Postgres. Curious if there are any Postico users who have tried this yet.
Very Mac-oriented, and I think IntelliJ built-in DB editor has way more functions / features.
The heavy Mac UX compliance is the reason why I enjoy using Postico for 99% of straightforward Postgres tasks
10+ year user of Postico. I will give this a try. I hope Copilot can start recognizing the schema when I use node-pg.
This is so cool. A big reason I used prisma was for prisma studio. Having this kind of support in vscode is nice to see
(prisma team member)

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

Ooooh can’t wait for that, and for further investment in Prisma Studio generally — already a really nice tool, I just want some slightly more power-user-y stuff!
The AI integration is interesting to me. I have been trying to get Claude to help me with postgres from within my product and have found its ability and understanding of postgres/sql to be significantly worse than with common programming languages.

Maybe it's because my tolerance for imperfection is much lower for databases than web apps, but it is so bad that I can't trust it for anything database-related beyond text transformations and generating boilerplate queries. It will incorrectly tell me things like postgres doesn't support TABLE OF <TYPE>, or make syntax errors for ON CONFLICT, and immediately agree with any "what about" or "are you sure" I throw at it.

Curious if anybody else has run into this. Obviously LLMs are not always great in specialized domains like this but the poor performance with something as popular as postgres is pretty uncharacteristic IMMO.

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