I'm very happy that something like this exists!
I'm wondering why have there have been no good IDE experiences so far for Postgres? Or put another way, what has been the most challenging part of building this?
Nothing I have tried so far comes close to what I'm used to with statically typed languages. One would think something as strict as Postgres would have good autocomplete by now but I've yet to find something.
Not sure what you’re looking for exactly.
If it’s just a nice GUI for interacting with postgres, Postico (for mac) is fantastic. Autocomplete is good, and the UI is very intuitive if you’re familiar with mac. It’s also a native app so it’s wicked fast. None of that web app pretending to be an app nonsense lol.
If you’re looking for a better experience interacting with a postgres server in a static typed language, like java, i’d check out Jooq. It’s been a while since i’ve used it but it basically lets you query a postgres database with proper types in your java code.
we write about this in the blog post, but the tldr is that the Postgres syntax is ever-evolving and very verbose. its almost impossible to properly parse Postgres code in a sustainable way. all these tools usually try to do exactly that and eventually give up. we are building upon libpg_query instead, which is the actual Postgres server code extracted into a C library. that parser is built to parse executable SQL though, so we had to find a few workarounds to make it work.