Understood, but I would have suspected that the search_path value would have been expanded to report all the tables visible under each schema, and not mask any. It just surprised me a little.
On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 10:37 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
"David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes: > On Friday, January 20, 2017, John Scalia <jayknowsunix@gmail.com> wrote: >> So, to me this is somewhat non-intuitive behavior, but maybe I'm all wet >> here. Shouldn't \dt report all the tables it can see with the search_path >> set to some value? And btw, this is was the behavior on 9.4.10, so if it's >> changed in more recent versions, I haven't tested there yet.
> It shows the definition of the table you would be referencing if you used > that name in a query. This seems like a useful behavior.
Right --- according to our normal terminology, b.mytable is *not* visible, because it is masked by a.mytable being ahead of it in the search path. You'd have to write a qualified name to get at b.mytable.
You can write, eg, "\dt *.mytable" or "\dt *.*" if you would like it to show tables that are not visible according to this rule. Without a dot in the pattern, \dt shows only visible tables, ie only the ones you could name without putting a dot in the name.