Re: SHOW TABLES

simon@2ndQuadrant.com (Simon Riggs) writes:
> Just for the record, I've never ever met anyone that said "Oh, this
> \d syntax makes so much sense. I'm a real convert to Postgres now
> you've shown me this". The reaction is always the opposite one;
> always negative. Which detracts from our efforts elsewhere.

If we're opening up the code to change this, it makes a lot of sense
to try to Do It Really Right so that we're not going over this again
and again.

I think we're seeing several things that suck, and I'm quite sure I
have not yet heard an answer that resolves it all.  Things that have
become clear:
1.  \d isn't exactly the most intuitive thing ever
    And it's pretty clear that we have been heading into some    increasingly cryptic bits of fruit salad of
\dfzb+-meta-bucky-alt-foo
    Having SHOW THIS and SHOW THAT which are a bit more readily    guessed would be somewhat nice.
2.  information_schema doesn't have some useful things that we'd like    it to have
    Listing databases would be nice.  Unfortunately, "ANSI didn't    define a way to do that, so we can't add it."
    Alas, I don't see a good way to improve on this :-(
3.  The \? commands are *solely* for psql, and it would be nice to    have the Improvement work on server side so it's
notonly usable    with the one client.
 
4.  It would be Mighty Useful for whatever extensions get defined    server-side to also be "relational" so that they
canbe usefully    scripted in ways NOT vulnerable to screen size, output hackery,    and such.
 
    - I've seen too many QA scripts that do awk parsing of output of      psql "\d" commands that are vulnerable to all
kindsof awfulness.      Add an "updated-on" column to the output, and suddenly everything      breaks.
 
    - I'd sure like to be able to write queries that *don't* involve      array smashing or using "grep" on \z output
toanalyze object      permissions.
 
    - \? output is often *not* amenable to this, as it sometimes has      extra bits of data hierarchy in it.  And
"arrayaggregation."
 

There's a certain risk of things being overspecified such that there's
*no* solution, but I don't think that forcibly *has* to happen.

But the answers I'm seeing thus far run slipshod across too many of
these things, so I don't see that we have arrived at actual solutions
yet.
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