On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 02:37:28PM -0800, Josh Berkus wrote: > Jim, > > > It's a question of if these views will also be used programatically. > > ISTM that OIDs are the preffered method of refering to things in code > > (in fact, aren't there some functions that only take OIDs?). If we want > > to make names the cannonical way to reference things in code, then I > > agree that there's not much use to OIDs. > > Hmmm .... I think that you and I have different ideas about the purpose of > the > system views. My idea is to provide a stable (through multiple versions of > pg), human-readable view of the system objects. You obviously want to do > more -- I'd like details on what that more is, so that we can talk about it.
Really, my only goal is to make using the system views/tables programatically easier by coming up with a better naming convention. This isn't directly related to the human-readable stuff, other than fields that would be common between both sets of views. Perhaps a good way to accomplish both goals is to have the set of human-readable views, and to add columns to the system tables/views that conform with the new, more logical naming convention. This way people accessing system information programmatically can use pg_catalog (and migrate to the new naming convention), while people who are doing ad-hoc queries can just hit the human-readable stuff. Make sense? -- Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 Windows: "Where do you want to go today?" Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?" ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match