Thursday, 13 July 2017

Some numbers, oh, and pgAdmin 4 v1.6 was released

It's been far too long since I wrote a blog post (again!), so in a bid to start fixing that, here's an easy one:

pgAdmin 4 v1.6 released

The pgAdmin Development Team are pleased to announce the release of pgAdmin 4 version 1.6. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes over 70 bug fixes and a dozen new features. For details, please see the release notes.
Notable changes in this release include:

  • Significant performance improvements on Windows, massively reducing initial load time and improving UI response for the vast majority of users during testing.
  • Enhancements to the Query Tool enabling the viewing of large query resultsets far more quickly. For example, a simple test query with 96K rows rendered results within 1 second vs. 22 seconds in pgAdmin III during testing!
  • A major rewrite of the Query History tab allows browsing of queries executed in the query tool with full details including the entire query, in a much nicer user interface.
  • The Desktop Runtime now supports detachable tabs, allowing the Query Tool and Debugger to be opened in new tabs and then moved to alternate displays (from 1.5 this was possible in web mode only)
  • The Query Tool's Results Grid has been overhauled with a new, sleek look an feel supporting selection of arbitrary rows, columns or blocks of cells with full copy support and column sizing retention.
  • The Dashboard tab can now be closed if desired, to minimise query traffic resulting from graph updates.
For more information, checkout the online documentation, the screenshots, and of course the download page.

Collaboration

For those that aren't aware, pgAdmin 4 is the fourth complete rewrite of pgAdmin since the first code was written way back in 1998(!). One of the major aims of the technology change we made for the new version was to help attract new developers as we always found them extremely hard to find when we used C++ (we now use Python and Javascript). To kickstart the project, EnterpriseDB (my employer) allowed me to make use of one of our development teams and we embarked on a pretty epic journey to get the first release done. Much of that is documented in an earlier post.

We were happy to find that our plan worked - better than expected in fact - when Pivotal started contributing heavily to the project, bringing new skills and techniques that have enabled us to improve both pgAdmin and the way we design and develop it even further. This release of pgAdmin is the first to include major changes in functionality developed by the Pivotal team, which you can see in the overhauled Query Tool result grid UI and the enhanced Query History tab.

Today, community members, EnterpriseDB staff and Pivotal staff all collaborate to make pgAdmin better and better. Look out on the mailing lists for ways you can get involved, by joining periodic meetings we hold, participating in user focus sessions, or contributing to the project in any other way that may interest you.

Numbers

Well, I promised you some numbers and here they are. This info was compiled for my boss Marc last week who was curious to see how things were working out expanding the developer base on the project. Numbers are based on 2017-01-01 - 2017-07-05 stats from the GIT repository:

Number of committed changes by EDB:     256 (mostly smaller items such as bug fixes)
Number of committed changes by Pivotal:  67 (some larger changes)
Number of committed changes by Others:   62

Lines of code added by EDB:        32,542
Lines of code added by Pivotal:   110,017
Lines of code added by others:     19,221

Lines of code removed by EDB:      20,056
Lines of code removed by Pivotal:  35,688
Lines of code removed by Others:    2,184

I love it when a plan comes together :-)