On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > Is there any use for SHOW except in interactive psql sessions?
>
> There certainly is. Imagine querying for timezone. Also remember that
> pgadmin is a client application that is _not_ psql.
I should have written SHOW ALL, that's the command output that is too wide
to fit in a normal terminal window. Do pgadmin use SHOW ALL?
I would expect pgadmin to query pg_settings so that it get all info about
the variable that is stored and show it in the gui in some way. But I
don't use pgadmin so I don't know how it show the list of server
variables.
SHOW ALL really is an interactive command line interface command that is
implemented by the server.
> > Nothing that can't be done by querying pg_settings.
>
> True, so we have pg_settings and SHOW. I see no reason for a third,
> \show.
The same can be said about all slash-commands in psql.
By the way, we have yet another way. We have the functions that fetch
server variable settings, like pg_show_all_settings().
Is your suggestion that we keep SHOW ALL as is? Or is that we extend it to
something like SHOW ALL NO DESC?
If we keep it as is then I would like to ask who is the target user it's
designed for? It's probably not for psql users since the output isn't
readable by anyone but those that have terminal windows > 165 characters
wide. It can't be for computer clients since those don't need the
description column. So who is it designed for?
--
/Dennis Björklund