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> 1. \d isn't exactly the most intuitive thing ever > Seems fairly mnemomic to me (d=describe) and it packs a *lot* of information into a single letter (see below). Things that are done often should have short keystrokes, and not require learning Yet Another Meta-Language. > And it's pretty clear that we have been heading into some > increasingly cryptic bits of fruit salad of > \dfzb+-meta-bucky-alt-foo No arguments there, but that's the nature of the beast. I don't think it's as bad as is made out, however, as \d covers 99% of everyday usage and certainly the "show tables" that started this thread. > Having SHOW THIS and SHOW THAT which are a bit more readily > guessed would be somewhat nice. I'm not sure why "easily guessed" is thrown out in this thread as such a great thing. To achieve that goal, we simply need the help system that has been proposed many times: entering in "SHOW <anything>" gives you a quick rundown of the backslash system. As far as SHOW THIS, there is a big difference from a plain "\dt" and "\d <tablename>". The former could be emulated quite easily with a SHOW command (although even our \dt prints out more information than mysql's SHOW TABLES), but the latter includes a crazy amount of information that would lead to quite a large "SHOW..." statement. Also, if it were made a server-side thing, how would you return things like indexes on a table in a SRF? Have a meta-column describing what the other columns represent? Ugly. > information_schema doesn't have some useful things that we'd like > ait to have ... > Alas, I don't see a good way to improve on this :-( newsysviews seems the way out of that particular mess. I'm also not particularly opposed to adding new views or columns to information_schema. We would still support the standard by having all the required views and columns. > The \? commands are *solely* for psql, and it would be nice to > have the Improvement work on server side so it's not only usable > with the one client. Agreed, but is there some other command-line client? If it's not command-line, free-form SQL typing, it inevitably already has support for querying the catalogs built in. At least, every GUI, app, and driver I can think of does. > I've seen too many QA scripts that do awk parsing of output of > psql "\d" commands that are vulnerable to all kinds of awfulness. They should be querying information_schema. > I'd sure like to be able to write queries that *don't* involve > array smashing or using "grep" on \z output to analyze object > permissions. Yeah, that would be a better information_schema. :) - -- Greg Sabino Mullane g...@turnstep.com End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/ PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 201007191011 http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iEYEAREDAAYFAkxEXS0ACgkQvJuQZxSWSshLKwCffkfe0T3tELInxRqG7yCDS5Vr Ku8AoLUtOu7tTplGZZLPOEuDfKHt+EEm =Oubu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers