Doug McNaught wrote:
> '\d' and friends in psql are just shorthand for queries against the
> system catalogs. So you're not "stepping outside the language",
> really.
But the system catalogs' names and organization are themselves
PostgreSQL specific. Presumably MySQL and Oracle and the other folks
don't have tables named "pg_relcheck", "pg_class", and so on. They
probably provide the same facilities, but not in the same way.
I guess this is the part I find suprising: the non-standardization of
database meta-information. SQL is great for getting information *out*
of a database, but seems to have a serious blind spot when it comes to
fetching information *about* a database.
{shrug}
In any case, thanks for the "psql -E" tip!