Re: SHOW TABLES

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Robert Haas (robertmhaas@gmail.com) wrote:
> I think "LIST COMMENTS ON SYSTEM AGGREGATES" would be an epic 
> step forward in usability.

Perhaps. But it would behoove you to come up with a less er...
arcane example. I've been using Postgres a long time, and I can 
count the number of times I've needed to see comments on system 
aggregates on my hand. With at least four fingers left over.
...
> in the "alphabet soup" paragraph above.  I don't think there's
> anything WRONG with letting "\dFp" show text search dictionaries and
> "\dfwS+" list system window functions with additional detail - but I'd
> like an alternative that emphasizes ease of remembering over brevity,
> works in every client, and can be extended in whatever reasonable ways
> the community decides are worth having.
...
I don't know that I'd necessarily remember all those any better, and would 
certainly not enjoy typing out:

LIST TEST SEARCH DICTIONARIES

I don't have to remember \dFp - all I have to remember is \?. For the 
more common ones that I use day to day and don't have to look up 
(\d \dt \df \l etc.) the advantage of a two or three character 
string is strong.

(There is some devil's advocate in there - a standard cross client 
(and dare I say it, cross RDBMS?) way would be nice)

...
> 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.

Well, there's the rub. You're arguing this from a hacker's persepective, 
while the SHOW syntax seems to be overwhelmingly agreed upon to be either 
helpful for clueless noobs, or some nice syntactic sugar for average users.

> I'm not sure where to draw the line but implementing a proper shortcut
> interface for cammands is something taht should be done on the client side
> because not every client is the same and the needs of psql might be
> radically different from any other client (like pgadmin or a fancy Web 2.0
> AJAX thingy - those will likely always use custom catalog queries).
> Maybe a differnet way to look at the whole thing is to reconsider our own
> catalogs (anyone remember newsysview?) and add a bunch of views to abstract
> away most of the current complexity for these usecases?

Yep, agreed. Now, if we can just agree to put information_schema in the default 
search_path, because nobody enjoys having to type out "information_schema"...

- -- 
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/
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http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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