Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@atentus.com> writes:
> You can also use the pg_tables view, for example, and the system
> catalogs for the rest (pg_database, pg_attribute).
> Anyway, there's little use for SHOW queries, as you can always poke into
> the system catalogs. That's something you can't do in MySQL, and is the
> reason for the SHOW hack.
If we actually implement anything new in this line, it will presumably
be the SQL-standard-compliant INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Although as
far as I can see, those have nothing to recommend them except standards
compliance :-(. "SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES" doesn't seem
to have any great advantage over either "\d" or whatever the equivalent
MySQL SHOW command is...
regards, tom lane