The PostgreSQL clients

In addition to PgAdmin III and the psql client tools, there are a lot of vendors producing tools for PostgreSQL that cover different areas, such as database administration, modeling, development, reporting, ETL, and reverse engineering. In addition to the psql tool, PostgreSQL is shipped with several client tools, including the following:

• Wrappers: The wrappers are built around SQL commands such as CREATE USER. These wrappers facilitate the interaction between the database server and the developer, and automate the daily routine tasks.
• Backup and replication: PostgreSQL supports physical and logical backups. The physical backup is performed by taking a snapshot of the database files. The physical backup can be combined with WAL in order to achieve streaming replication or a hot standby solution. Logical backup is used to dump the database in the form of SQL statements. Unlike physical backup, one can dump and restore a single database.
• Utilities: PostgreSQL comes with several utilities to ease extraction of information and to help in diagnosing the problems.

The PostgreSQL community unifies the look and feel of the client tools as much as possible; this makes it easy to use and learn. For example, the connection options are unified across all client tools. The following list shows the connection options for psql, which are common for other PostgreSQL clients as well:

• -d: The database name 
• -h: The host name or IP address 
• -u: The username 
• -p: The port 

Also, most PostgreSQL clients can use the environment variables supported by libpq, such as PGHOST, PGDATABASE, and PGUSER. The libpq environment variables can be used to determine the default connection parameter values.