I’ve spent a few hours so far working with Navicat for Postgres connected to our GreenPlum MPP (Massively Parallel Processing Database). (pgAdmin continues to iritate me but it’ll be hard for a competitor to supplant the free incumbent). There is definitely some solid functionality here.

Pros:

1. Performance – The UI seems to be balzingly fast (to the point that you’re not sure you switched from one table to another because there was no flicker of the screen indicating it refreshed)
2. Object View – Provides an ERD style view of the database. With no foreign keys in GreenPlum there is no indication of how the tables relate to each other but there’s not much to be done about that.
3. One click formatting – The Beautify SQL feature is a nice benefit (which is still missing from a number of other tools). It would be nice to be able to customize the formatting but I’ll take what I can get.
4. Intellisense – The intellisense/autocomplete seems works fairly well for syntax suggestions but is a bit on the slow side when suggesting database objects.

Cons:

1. GreenPlum specific DDL such as “DISTRIBUTED BY” will execute successfully in a query window but will not display when you look up the DDL in the tool.
2. Finding the DDL for a table takes some work – right click on the object, choose “object information” (the last entry in the context menu). In the lower pane of the main window click the DDL tab.

Conclusion:

I’ve only done an initial assessment so I’ll reserve final judgement but for now I’m liking Navicat enough to keep playing with it.

You can download the free trial at Navicat for Postgres.