Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I assume SHOW TABLES would only be useful for interactive terminal
> sesssions, not for application code (which should use
> information_schema), so what non-psql interactive terminal programs are
> there?
>
>
I think your assumption is questionable.
Plenty of people use MySQL's "SHOW TABLES" in non-interactive settings
(for good or ill). That's why any suggestion that we should return
anything other than a resultset seems like a really terrible idea to me.
This could presumably be implemented by creating a view to return the
required information and then making "SHOW TABLES" an alias for "select
* from viewname".
FYI, MS-SQL does this stuff with some stored procedures. I regularly use
sp_columns to fiind out what I'm really being asked to interact with.
See <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182764.aspx>
cheers
andrew