Re: GSoC proposal for pgAdmin 4 bytea support

Thanks Dave! I looked at your project descriptions and decided to create an application for Query Tool Graphing. Here's my partially complete proposal:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zZhpmZQZBuZNsJA1UeKHrXKFJQCfmKKvTsnNbdmtT_0/edit?usp=sharing

Everyone's welcome to give me feedback/suggestions! Thank you!

Howard

On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 3:15 AM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

Hi

[Moving pgsql-hackers to BCC to prevent further cross-posting]

On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 12:36 AM Haoran Yu <haleyyew@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear PostgreSQL community:

I am a MSc student in computer science working on data management research, and I will likely graduate this summer. I also was a participant of GSoC in 2017 working with the NRNB organization on data standards conversion.

Cool.

 

I have been a user of pgAdmin 4 briefly, and I am interested in learning more about the project and contribute to it. The projects web page lists 3 potential projects, but I don't know which one I'm suitable for. Are there any suggestions on how to get started on exploring more about the Query Tool in pgAdmin? For example, use cases with some sample data would be nice! I also checked out the pgadmin4 repository from git, and I'll start exploring the code shortly. 

The choice of which project to work on is entirely down to your own personal interests. You can even propose something else if you like, though the listed projects are ones that are likely to be accepted as they're known to be valuable.

The first project (Query Tool Graphing) has a simple use case of allowing any user to quickly render a graph of their data. More specific use cases can be discussed as part of the project, but quite simply the idea is to allow users a quick and easy way to visualise their data. It would probably help to install PostGIS in a database, and then load the test data we used to play with it and see how that works (see https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAA7HE_cU7bmQv1kdPB3hiKYGJLaOVVft_XxqcD6ueJpAGfqykQ%40mail.gmail.com - specifically, the Google Drive link). The GIS viewer is similar to what I have in mind for this feature, except that instead of drawing maps, we'd draw different types of graphs.

The second project is about supporting bytea in the Query Tool. Right now bytea data isn't rendered when you run a query - we show a placeholder instead. The use case here is for users that store media files in bytea columns; we want to be able to automatically detect different file types and allow them to be viewed (or listened to) in the tool. When running in Edit more, the user should be able to add or replace data in a row by uploading from the browser. I don't have any sample data for this.

The final project listed is a long-term design goal of pgAdmin 4 (and probably the hardest project). In pgAdmin 3 we had separate Query Tool and View/Edit data tools. In pgAdmin 4, we made them into the same tool, but running in two separate modes. The use case here is to prevent the need for the user to choose what mode to open the tool in (Query Tool vs. View/Edit Data), and to automatically detect whether any query would produce an updateable resultset. This would allow the tool to offer all features at all times, and simple enable/disable in-place editing of the query results if there's no way to automatically generate an update/insert/delete statement. This one is potentially hard as it will likely require some amount of parsing of the query string to make that determination. You can simply play with any test data to get a feel for this one.

Hope this helps.

Regards, Dave.

 

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Dave Page
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