System Tables

Hi

Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
tables I may find what informations? I try to code a generic procedure
which gets information (like field type, field length, foreign keys...)
about tables and fields from a system table.

Thank you for your help in advance

sj

See:

http://www.us.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.2/postgres/catalogs.html

for PostgreSQL 7.2.x, for 7.3 see:

http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/catalogs.html

Lee.

Steve Jackson writes:
> Hi
>
> Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
> tables I may find what informations? I try to code a generic procedure
> which gets information (like field type, field length, foreign keys...)
> about tables and fields from a system table.
>
> Thank you for your help in advance

On Thu, 2002-11-28 at 02:32, Steve Jackson wrote:
> Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
> tables I may find what informations?

The PostgreSQL Developer's Guide has some information:

http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/catalogs.html

But IIRC it might be a little out of date. Also, starting psql with "-E"
and taking a look at the queries it uses to generate data is often
useful.

Cheers,

Neil

--
Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> || PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC

On Thursday 28 November 2002 00:32, Steve Jackson wrote:
> Hi
>
> Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
> tables I may find what informations? I try to code a generic procedure
> which gets information (like field type, field length, foreign keys...)
> about tables and fields from a system table.
>

Read the man page for psql.
Check out the section for PSQL META_COMMANDS.

Sounds like everything you need is in there.

Andy

Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> writes:
>> Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
>> tables I may find what informations?

> The PostgreSQL Developer's Guide has some information:
> http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/catalogs.html

> But IIRC it might be a little out of date.

One would hope not. It's taken us awhile to finish the work of
documenting every system catalog, but as of 7.3 they are all in there.
I intend to crack the whip as much as necessary to ensure that these
docs get updated whenever someone changes the catalogs ;-)

Actually, pointing people to the developer docs is more likely to create
the reverse problem: what they read there may be too new for the release
they are actually using.

regards, tom lane