Re: DatabaseMetaData.getTypeInfo() question

Interesting,

I just happened to read some code or docs which explains this. Every
table when created also creates an entry in pg_type. Postgres supports
inheritance, so every table is a type.

Dave

On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 04:40, Roger Bjärevall wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are currently testing the upcoming version of DbVisualizer with
> PostgreSQL and the JDBC drivers.
>
> We have one concern and that is the information returned from the
> DatabaseMetaData.getTypeInfo() method.
>
> It returns a lots of information, some are data type info while some
> are tables or functions(?).
>
> We did a quick comparision of the supported data types as listed in the
> PostgreSQL documenation and what is returned by the getTypeInfo call.
> The result is rather confusing for us.
>
> (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.3/static/datatype.html)
>
> - Among the real data types we find types such as:
>
>    TYPE_NAME    DATA_TYPE    PRECISION
>    pg_cast    1111        9
>    pg_class    1111        9
>    pg_constraint    1111        9
>    pg_conversion    1111        9
>    pg_database    1111        9
>
>    What is this and why do they appear when getting type info?
>
> - The documentation lists data types as "Type Name" and "Aliases".
>    Why do the getTypeInfo() call return the aliased name for almost
>    all data types that have an alias instead of the in most cases
>    preferred "Type Name"?
>    I.e we believe that users coming from other databases would prefeer
>    "bigint" rather then "int8", "smallint" rathern then "int2", etc.
>    There are some exceptions to this such as the "varchar" alias which
>    is more common then "character varying".
>
>    One solution is simply to add the real type names to the existing list
>    of data types as returned by the getTypeInfo() call.
>
> Any feedback is appreciated.
>
> Roger Bjärevall
> Minq Software
>
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