Re: SHOW TABLES

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
<heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On 16/07/10 20:11, Rob Wultsch wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Robert Haas<robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> For committers.
>>
>> Perhaps this discussions should be moved to the General list in order
>> to poll the userbase.
>>
>> My .02 is that SHOW commands (even if they are not compatible) would
>> make it much easier for me to make an argument to my boss to at least
>> consider moving off another open source database. The show commands
>> are in *very* widespread use by the MySQL community even after ~5
>> years of having the i_s. The Drizzle team (a radical fork of MySQL)
>> very briefly considered removing the SHOW commands and the unanimous
>> objections that followed caused that idea to scrapped.
>
> That's for MySQL. I come from a DB2 background, and when I started using
> psql years ago, I often typed "LIST TABLES" without thinking much about it.
> Not SHOW TABLES, but LIST TABLES.
>
> I bet Oracle users coming to PostgreSQL will try "DESC". Not SHOW TABLES. As
> Simon listed, every DBMS out there has a different syntax for this.
>
> I have nothing against SHOW TABLES (it might cause conflicts in grammar
> though), but if we're going to cater to people migrating from MySQL, I feel
> we should cater to people migrating from other products too. But surely
> we're not going to implement 10 different syntaxes for the same thing! We
> could, however, give a hint in the syntax error in all those cases. That way
> we're not on the hook to maintain them forever, and we will be doing people
> a favor by introducing them to the backslash commands or information schema,
> which are more powerful.
>
> --
>  Heikki Linnakangas
>  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com
>

desc[ribe] also works in MySQL.

Perhaps describe would be a good option:
describe tables
describe table <table name> (or perhaps descrive <object>?)
describe schemas
etc

--
Rob Wultsch
wultsch(at)gmail(dot)com