Re: Enhancement to SQL query capabilities

Andrew Smith <laconical@gmail.com> writes:
> Looking to migrate a software product to postgres coming from a home-grown
> DBMS. Whilst the majority of features in postgres are a gazillion times
> better than what our own DBMS has, one feature that I find I am missing is
> the ability to dereference foreign key fields in queries without having to
> join a bunch of tables together.

Aside from the other solutions that have been mentioned, have you
considered querying a view that contains the desired join?

There's no substitute for fixing that nonstandard syntax, in any case.
Even if you could persuade pgsql-hackers that the concept was good
(which I really doubt), they'd not go for using : as a selector.
        regards, tom lane