Finding a good Postgres Visual Query Builder for Mac

Any tool, whether free or paid, that can reduce headache and speed up development is money well spent.

With a fairly complex multi table and condition query to write in a format suitable for Supabase Javascript Client Library it seemed logical to invest the time finding a Client that worked.

I remember the days of using Visual Query builders at secondary school in the early 2000’s with MS Access so naturally.

Most of the Clients on the market are really old and from the pre-“SaaS and subscriptions for everything” era when people made Open Source software for free.

Dbeaver – $10 a month.

The visual builder didn’t really work at all.

DBVisualizer Pro – $100s a year.

This actually worked pretty well once I’d figured out how to copy the code from the Visual Editor back to the SQL editor.

It seems to be heavily based on the source of Dbeaver and has some of the quirks. For example Table Alias’s changed in the UI aren’t copied back to the SQL Editor view even using the button above. If everything in the SQL Editor is manually deleted first before copying back it works.

Another problem is that Compound Queries don’t get proper parenthesis placed around the OR statement for example and so later conditions may be ignored. When it’s not possible to reorder Conditions, or edit the SQL and return to the Visual view it means a mistake can mean remaking a lot of queries in the UI.

Cloud Based – Skyvia

Wayyy to basic and didn’t have anything for relationships in it’s very simple. This is such a boring blog post.

Converting back into the right syntax for Supabase

I started a trial of GitHub co-pilot today. That seems to have answered every single question I have had without fail. It identified the error in the SQL from DBvisualizer and effortlessly converted the SQL into Typescript.

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