Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 11:14 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> > Robert Haas wrote:
> >> I'd like to be able to list comments on objects of a particular type.
> >> And, yeah, I'd like to be able to list all the aggregates that take a
> >> numeric argument, or all the functions that take, say, an argument of
> >> type internal. ?Right now, this is an ENORMOUS pain in the neck. ?I
> >> usually end up running psql -c '<some backslash command>' | ?grep |
> >> awk ... or something like that. ?I have no idea what Windows users do.
> >> ?I'm sure it's possible to write a query to do it, but it's not
> >> anything approaching easy. ?All of this talk about backslash commands
> >> being powerful rings totally hollow for me. ?For ordinary, day to day
> >> tasks like listing all my tables, or looking at the details of a
> >> particular table, they're great. ?I use them all the time and would
> >> still use them even if some other syntax were available. ?But there is
> >> no reasonable way to pass options to them, and that to me is a pretty
> >> major drawback.
> >
> > I am concerned that implementing a command syntax to show complex output
> > like above effectively means re-implementing a subset of SQL, and that
> > subset will never be as flexible.
>
> That's a reasonable concern, but I don't have a better idea. Do you?
Sorry for the late reply. If we are going to end up recreating SQL, we
might as well just keep the backslash mess we have, or tell them to use
SQL for the complex queries. My point was that we might find that what
we cook up is as complex as what we have now.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +