One of the feedback i have heard from people using SSMS is that it has all the admin operations available in the UI as compared to doing it yourself. Lot of admins i deal with day to day do not want to use the terminal or sqlcmd.
I'm wondering if thats true.
Admins don’t ever close the tool, it’s always open on some RDP. Devs have different usage patterns.
SSMS is super duper nice if you’re an admin or a power SQL server user/dev. Nothing I’ve seen in Postgres world is comparable.
The only thing I wish they'd do with SSMS is add scaling support to the app... It's a bit small for my usage most of the time.
I've started using the extensions for VS Code a lot since they killed the separate code based SQL studio app. I also use a SQLite extension, though I wish the SQLite extension worked a bit more like the MS SQL extension does. Overall they're both nice.
Definitely different workflows for Devs vs DBAs though.. and you're right, DBAs don't really close SSMS, that said, I think the VS Code extension(s) are better for most dev usage.
What you are describing is access via a PAM. Via RDP is one way to accessing it.