Re: SHOW TABLES

On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 18:43 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 18:35, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 17:38 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> >
> >> Is there an actual common use-case for having these commands available
> >> for *non-psql* interfaces?
> >
> > There are many interfaces out there and people writing new ones
> > everyday. We just wrote an interface for Android, for example.
> >
> > It is arguably *more* important to do this from non-psql interfaces.
> >
> > There should be one command to "display a list of tables" and it needs
> > to be easily guessable for those who have forgotten.
>
> The downside is that you are then limited to what can be returned as a
> resultset. A "\d table" in psql returns a hell of a lot more than
> that. So do we keep two separate formats for this? Or do we remove the
> current, useful, output format in favor of a much worse formt just to
> support more clients?

I imagined that we would do something similar to EXPLAIN, a set of text
rows returned.

It should be possible to migrate \d options to using new outputs, when
everything works in a useful manner. Probably not in this release.

If I get some working solutions ready for Sept 15 we then have 4 months
for other people to patch away at this.

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services