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justintocci left another comment, which he has since deleted, but since I've spent some time investing in an answer, I'm posting it here. Justin, if you dislike being quoted, let me know.

> In fact, it really should have had these tools a decade ago.

What does "should" mean here? That it'd have been good? Sure. That people working (as a hobby, or as part of their employment) on PG should have stopped doing what they were, and instead focus on doing tooling? Maybe, but given the very very limited number of people and their skills I doubt it'd have been a good trade.

> So I propose a better question. Why doesn't PostgreSQL have free, enterprise-grade tools?

I think there's plenty of reasons, and everyone will weigh them differently: For one, the development community is actually surprisingly small, especially a couple years back; only in the last few years that's changed to some degree. Which means we're often struggling to get the crucially needed server features done, not to speak of delving into a bunch of features outside of our expertise.

Another big reason, and that might sound counterintuitive, is PostgreSQL's license. Because of it and the long community support cycles, companies around PG have a hard time making money w/ licensing etc. So they have to focus on support, training and value-adds. A number companies tried / try to make money selling software around postgres, more enterprise-y tooling among that. Often that doesn't turn out to work that well, because it's actually a lot of work, and without input from the larger community they don't get the necessary market penetration.

Thirdly, I think that PG's development is done by a number of different companies, with each company's share of development not being large enough to sustain the project, explains some of this. I think it's overall an advantage, but in some areas like coordinated planning, marketing and coordinated effort it has its downsides too. If you want to make value-add software around core you're not going to do so with a competitor.

Lastly, I think for a long time Pgadmin3 was seen as not being good, but kinda somewhat acceptable. But its implementation wasn't particularly clean, in a language relatively few GUI folks use (C++), using a dying and buggy GUI framework (wxwidgets). I think it was for a long time just good enough that MVP of something better wasn't all that minimal anymore.