Re: User-friendliness for DROP RESTRICT/CASCADE

Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com> writes:
> It would be nice if the recursive dependency checking function was 
> available as an end user function too, so you could analyze dependencies 
> before even trying to drop something, or even just to understand a 
> database schema you've inherited from someone else.

It'd be a pretty trivial exercise to build something that looks at the
pg_depend entries and generates whatever kind of display you want.

David Kaplan reminded me that there is another UI issue to be
considered: when we *are* doing a DROP CASCADE, should the dropped
dependent objects be reported somehow?  As it stands, Rod's patch emits
elog(NOTICE) messages in this case, but I am wondering whether that will
be seen as useful or merely annoying chatter.
        regards, tom lane