FWIW, I don't see the issue as "internal vs external" at all. What's bothering me is whether these views can be considered sufficiently more stable and better designed than the physical system catalogs to justify recommending that application designers should rely on the views instead of the catalogs. That point doesn't seem to me to have been proven. The recent arguments in favor seem to boil down to "novices will find these easier to use", which is very possibly true, but novices don't have the same needs as programs.
As lead phpPgAdmin developer, I'm officially in favour of them. The main reason being all the extra fruit they have that shows database size, etc.
That means we can display this meta information in phpPgAdmin and not worry about having to re-implement it all.
Chris
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TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your
joining column's datatypes do not match
