Fancy User Interfaces are fine

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

There are two schools of thought. First, the command-line geeks and then the click-and-drag brigade. Command-line folk use a terminal window and that could be black or white. Click-and-drag brigade members use bloated, heavy, and restrictive User Interfaces. These interfaces try to help individuals stay out of the code but often they end up limiting projects and slowing up everything.

Let us consider an example or two to illustrate the debate.

SQL operations using UI based tools or just a Database Utility

We need to draw a sample from a Database. What should our approach be?

Draw out the whole thing using operations

Use SPSS, SAS, Alteryx, RapidMiner, Power BI, DataStage or other UI tools

Write the SQL and drop it into a shorter diagram

Now the UI work is far less

Here is the SQL code

select GEO."Geo", AGE."Descripton", SUM(POP."Pop") AS “POP”
from “Tax”."Pop_clean" POP
LEFT join “Tax”."Country_regions" COUNTRY 
ON COUNTRY."LocID" = POP."LocID"
LEFT Join “Tax”."Geo" GEO 
on COUNTRY."Region" = GEO."Region"
LEFT JOIN “Tax”."Age_Levels" AGE 
on POP."AgeGrp" = AGE."AgeGrp"
GROUP BY GEO."Geo", AGE."Descripton"

Use a Database utility

Using pgAdmin4

With pgAdmin4 our query completes in 1 sec and 388 msec.

It opens in Excel directly via the download option

Using the heavy UI approach it took 1 minute, 22 seconds to get the sample. The time breakdown is 1 minute for the UI to load and 22 seconds for the job to run.

The Windows task manager

The next question will be how those Fancy User Interfaces play with the rest of your Computer. Above we can see Firefox using 506.0 MB and our Fancy UI tool using 283.2 MB.