Re: Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> ... So the application already knows
> that "foo" is the table and "a" is the column.  So if the application
> wants to know about details on the column "a", it can execute
> SELECT whatever FROM pg_attribute, pg_class WHERE relname = 'foo' AND attname = 'a';
> With this proposed change, it can replace that with
> SELECT whatever FROM pg_attribute, pg_class WHERE oid = X AND attnum = Y;

Dave will correct me if I'm wrong --- but I think the issue here is that
the client-side library (think ODBC or JDBC) needs to gain this level of
understanding of a query that is presented to it as an SQL-source
string.  So no, it doesn't already know that "foo" is the table and "a"
is the column.  To find that out, it has to duplicate a lot of backend
code.
        regards, tom lane