Sunday, July 16, 2017

Postgres Pager (pager designed for psql)

I hope so every, who uses psql uses less pager as default pager. See important Merlin's article. less is great pager, but it is not designed for usage as pager of relational data, and miss some features. Mainly, there is not possible to freeze some rows and some columns. I didn't find any solution good enough for me, although there are some projects on github. The special pager for psql should to have some logic, to choose correctly and automatically frozen columns (in chars) and rows.

I wrote new pager pspg - Postgres pager. This pager is designed primary for usage as psql pager. Now, it is available for playing and testing. Probably there will be some unwanted artefacts - but for usual work it is good enough. It is first my ncurses applications, probably there will be some bugs.

This pager currently supports:
* possibility to set one from three themes from command line: -s 0 - black/white theme, -s 1 mc theme, -s 2 fox theme,
* possibility to set frozen columns from command line: -c N or interactively (0..4),
* first few rows with labels are frozen automatically,
* scrolling: left, rights, up, down, PgUp, PgDn, ^PgUp, ^PgDn,
* possibility to run demo from command line: -d,
* supports different psql border linestyles: ascii, unicode,
* supports different psql border levels: 0, 1, 2

Usage:
export PAGER="pspg" #default theme 1
psql dbname
\pset border 2 #best works with border 2, but others are supported too
or
export PAGER="pspg -s 0" #black white theme
psql dbname
..

  • black white theme -s 0
  • midnight commander theme -s 1
  • fox theme -s 2


I invite any cooperation with people with ncurses knowleadge. All patches are welcome.

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

new packages in community repository

I wrote two small applications pgimportdoc and pgexportdoc. Now these applications are available from community repository (Thanks to Devrim GÜNDÜZ).

These applications should be used for import/export long documents (text, json, jsonb, xml, bytea) to/from Postgres.

[pavel@localhost ]$ ./pgimportdoc postgres -f ~/Stažené/enprimeur.xml -c 'insert into xmldata values($1)' -t XML
[pavel@localhost ]$ cat ~/Stažené/enprimeur.xml | ./pgimportdoc postgres -c 'insert into xmldata values($1)' -t XML
[pavel@localhost ]$ cat ~/Stažené/enprimeur.xml | ./pgimportdoc postgres -E latin2 -c 'insert into doc values($1) returning id' -t TEXT

[pavel@localhost ]$ pgexportdoc -c 'select x from xmldata where id = 1' -t XML -f myxmldoc.xml