Back almost 10 years ago, as mentioned probably a-many times, I exclusively used Debian to deploy Postgres database servers. That was mainly, because (officially) there were no Windows versions out yet, well, except for an older 7.2 version. My main interaction therefore was with bash and the postgres commandline tools (psql). I’ve not had a need to install postgres on a Linux machine since a while ago (2007?), so I was sort of surprised that 9.1 one was the most stable version. I barely touched the 8 series because, as you probably know, back in the days Debian Sarge only supported version 7.4.
I was not surprised I was still able to use psql’s commandline tools: heck, I was surprised that I still remember which command options to use to clear buffers and what not. If you do a combined Windows/Linux development, you don’t need pgadmin: as a matter of fact, I barely used it because (and even now), I find the program’s UI underwhelming.
The underwhelmingness (is that a word?) of pgadmin, was actually the sole reason to start up a SourceForge project to write a Delphi tool to set things right. I ended up abandoning the idea and focused on a tool to export data forth and back using plain ODBC connections. This initially evolved in a tool called ‘Helios’, written in Delphi, which then became HelioSQL when I rewrote this for .Net.
The only reason why I bring this up is to highlight that – while I already had extensive knowledge of Sybase (yay) and SQLserver – my heart was so close to postgres, that I used a similar naming convention for my database query tool.
Add. 1: There used to be a joke in the postgres mailing-lists on how to pronounce ‘PostgreSQL’. There were people who thought the unfortunate naming was the main cause of PostgreSQL’s low adoption rate. Everybody I ran into, just called PostgreSQL ‘Postgres’. The same idea is true for ‘HelioSQL’. I wouldn’t dare to claim that ‘Helios’ low adaption rate is because of its silly name.
Add. 2: A thing that blew me away was that I could run psql on both Windows and Unix platforms. This is where SQLServer is missing out: as far as I know there are no unix tools available that provide connectivity to SQLserver (well, I’m discounting ODBC for UNIX).