Re: Selecting tables from Browser

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 12:17 AM, Shirley Wang <swang(at)pivotal(dot)io> wrote:

> Hi Rob
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 1:53 PM Robert Eckhardt <reckhardt(at)pivotal(dot)io>
> wrote:
>
>> Shirley,
>>
>> I have a few questions.
>>
>> 1. Why 20. It is a dunbar number and seems smallish but is there
>> another reason?
>>
>> The browser fits about 30 ish items right now on my smallish laptop
> screen. The question we asked ourselves is 'what is the most content we can
> show before the browser gets unwieldy?'
>

A lot more than the proposed 20. I regularly work with ~100 tables in a
single schema, and having to go through an additional dialogue to find what
I need would be hugely inconvenient.

I will often learn about a new database by browsing through it as well,
jumping from table to table as I discover relationships etc. I couldn't
imagine doing that with a filtering dialogue getting in the way.

>
> You have thoughts on this?
>
>
>>
>> 1. Since this is referred to as an Object Manager I assume the same
>> thing will eventually be available for databases, schema, partitions, etc.
>> How do permissions work currently to limit m view of these objects? (or do
>> they)
>>
>>
> Good point about the name implying further reach than just tables. We're
> going to change the dialog header to show 'Select tables for display', at
> least until we decide we want to include databases, schema, partitions.
>
> I'm not sure how permissions works to limit the view, our assumption is
> that permissions does though.
>
> Dave P do you have more insight on what permissions can limit?
>

Permissions don't limit what you would see here. They limit a roles ability
to insert/update/delete data in tables, but not to examine the schema.

>
>> 1. Do you think that this would look differently if you assumptions
>> were based on a user who writes BI reports or some other non-DBA user?
>>
>> Potentially, as you mentioned off the email thread, a DBA would be
> interested in a larger list of tables than someone who writes BI reports.
>
> That said, since this is a problem we hear from DBAs, and they feel the
> most pain around this, I think it's fine to focus on solving the problem
> for them. Solving their pains will also address the pains of people who
> write BI reports since they also feel the same issues at a lesser intensity
>
> We will be testing with non-DBA users though too.
>

I think this is the wrong way to approach this problem. At the very least,
the limit of 20 objects needs to have a much higher value, and be
configurable.

I think it would be far better to implement searching of the tree as we had
in pgAdmin 3 (and a number of users have requested we re-implement), and do
partial branch loading on the tree, where we display maybe 30 items, then
add a "Load more..." node at the end, that when click would be replaced
with the next 30 items.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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