PostgreSQL: Basic Operations using DBeaver - Part 1

Once you restore a database and create a connection to it, next thing you want to do is have a look at the table structure and data inside those tables.

I'm going to use DBeaver for my database access/operations. Because it is very sophisticated tool, similar to SSMS for SQL server, but I think it has more options.

Let's take a look at how these basic operations are carried out with help of DBeaver tool.

In the "Database Navigator" panel of DBeaver, expand the database you want to access. Under database node, you will find "Schema" node (see picture above). Inside this node you will find all available schemas, in most cases it will be under public schema.

Under the schema, you will find usual database objects such as Tables, Views, Functions and etc.

If you want to see data in table, you can double click on it or you can right click and select "View Table" from the context menu.

This will open table in right hand side pane.

By default this shows first 200 rows in the table, with all columns in a grid view. If you want a text view (in case need to copy records into some where), you can switch to text view.

If you click on arrow icon on a column (in grid view), you get sorting and filtering options for that column.

Filter bar at the top shows current filters:

You can clear them all by clicking on eraser like icon the right side of the filter bar. You can further configure your filters by clicking "filter" icon on the right side.

Bottom bar shows very helpful buttons to interact with the table data.

There are buttons to add/delete/edit records in the table. Then you can export data in table by pressing "Export data" button. Next it shows number of records currently in the grid, followed by total number of records. However, when you initially load the table, it just shows 200+, because it has not counted all rows. If you want to know the total count of records you can click on the button in between two counts.

As you can see DBeaver provide rich set of GUI features to interact with data in your database. Of course you do all of these using plain SQL also.

We will see further feature in another article.