It’s an eventful week for the Dolt Workbench. Yesterday we announced that the workbench is now available as a desktop application on both Mac and Windows. Today we’re excited to announce that the Dolt Workbench now supports Doltgres, Postgres for Dolt.

Doltgres was released in Alpha in November 2023 and we plan on releasing Doltgres Beta in Q1 2025. Workbench compatibility is an important part of our path to a beta release and the Dolt Workbench is the best SQL workbench for Doltgres, as it comes with version control features like branches, commit logs, tags, and pull requests.

Getting started

This getting started guide will walk you through how to configure Doltgres in the Dolt Workbench, add data to a branch, create a commit, view logs and diffs, and merge a pull request.

Installation

We have a few different ways to install the Dolt Workbench:

1. Download the desktop application for Mac or Windows-x64
2. Pull the Docker Hub image
3. Build from source

You will also need to install Doltgres. The Dolt Workbench works with Doltgres versions >=0.13.0.

Connecting to Doltgres

Once you have Doltgres installed, running doltgres creates a doltgres user and a doltgres database and starts a server running on localhost port 5432.

$ doltgres
Successfully initialized dolt data repository.
Starting server with Config HP="localhost:5432"|T="28800000"|R="false"|L="info"|S="/tmp/mysql.sock"

You can enter this connectivity information from the workbench UI.

Creating some tables

Once you have successfully connected to our Doltgres database, we create a new database called getting_started and add some tables using the SQL console. We’ll use the example from the Doltgres Getting Started Guide.

Making a commit

Now that we have our three tables, we’ll use the Create commit button on the right to create a commit on our main branch.

Viewing the commit logs

And we will see our commit in the logs.

Making a change on a branch

Now we want to make an isolated change on a new branch. First, use the + button next to the branch dropdown in the left navigation to create a new branch from main.

Next, we’ll insert some data. We can use the SQL console, file upload, or the spreadsheet editor to add data to our tables.

Using the SQL console:

Using the spreadsheet editor:

We’ll again commit our changes, but this time the commit will be created on our changes branch.

Viewing the pull request

We want to see the changes that we made on our branch changes to make sure all the data we added looks correct before we merge it to our main branch. We can do this by navigating to the Pull Requests tab and choosing base branch main and from branch changes.

We can see the one commit we made on the changes branch, which we are proposing to merge into the main branch.

If we click on View Diff, we can see the summary of changes, as well as the cell-level changes we made to each of our tables.

Merging

Once we have reviewed all our changes, we can merge our branch into main using the Merge button on the pull request page. If successful, we’ll see our commit from our changes branch in the commit log for the main branch.

You have now added data to your Doltgres database using a Git-like version controlled workflow!

Conclusion

We’re working hard to launch Doltgres Beta in a few months, and workbench support is a step toward that goal. The Dolt Workbench is the best SQL workbench for Doltgres, so try it out and see how Doltgres can add powerful version control to your application. Let us know what you think in our Discord or file an issue for Doltgres or the Dolt Workbench if there are any additional features you’d like to see.