PostgreSQL - Red Hat Edition 3.0 comes with Administrator 2.0, Visual Explain 2.0, and Control Center 1.0-Beta.
Administrator provides Database Administrators with a graphical tool to define and maintain their database clusters. This release of the Administrator enables you to create, modify, drop, and browse database objects, users, and groups within multiple clusters. New to this release is the ability to perform maintenance tasks such as VACUUM. Details on Administrator can be found in Chapter 2 Administrator.
Visual Explain was developed to aid the Database Administrator and Application Developer in database schema design and application tuning. PostgreSQL provides EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE commands to display the query plan for an optimizable query. Output from these commands are plain-text trees that can be difficult to interpret for large or complex queries. Visual Explain provides a graphical representation of these trees that is easy to navigate and interpret. Details on Visual Explain can be found in Chapter 4 Visual Explain.
Control Center provides System Administrators and Database Administrators with a grapical tool to create and manage PostgreSQL - Red Hat Edition database services. This beta release of Control Center enables you to access the functions provided by PostgreSQL server-side utilities such as initdb, initlocation, pg_ctl, pg_config, and pg_controldata, as well as providing an alternative to the direct use of Linux system administration utilities such as service and chkconfig. Details on Control Center can be found in Chapter 6 Control Center.
The PostgreSQL - Red Hat Edition Graphical Tools are licensed under the GPL. The CVS repository at http://sources.redhat.com/rhdb/ provides the current development sources and information on the tools. Questions or comments about the tools should be directed to <rhdb@sources.redhat.com>.
This section describes the new features, usability enhancements, and robustness enhancements in Administrator.
This new, Java-based version of Administrator has the following new features:
Support for version 7.3 backends. However, there is no longer support for backend versions 7.2 and below.
Full Schema support.
Support for Casts, Conversions, Domains, and Operator Classes.
A highly configurable Table/View data browser has been added to allow you to view specific data sets from a table/view.
Composite Data Types can now be used as return types for functions.
All new options available for the CREATE/ALTER/DROP commands to various objects.
REINDEX and CLUSTER functionality has been added, making it easier to maintain tables.
Full privilege support.
Backup/Restore functionality is now available.
The Table Constraint definition has been simplified by the creation of a dialog, thereby removing the need for you to type in the column names manually.
The ALTER COLUMN dialog has been redesigned for improved usability.
CREATE INDEX now allows selection of operator classes.
New navigation system has been added to enable you to navigate to a specific node quickly. This system stores 30 previous items in its history.
The node structure in the Tree View has been rearranged to reflect correct grouping of various object types.
Quick shell (psql) access to a database can now be launched by right-clicking on the database name in the Tree View.
Tabbing order in dialogs has been fixed/enhanced to make keyboard-only operation simpler.
Various special ASCII characters are now handled correctly.
Object name handling is much more robust and secure.
If the connection to the backend breaks unexpectedly, Administrator now handles the error gracefully.
If the object has been dropped but is still visible in the Tree View, attempted operations on it are now handled gracefully.