Re: \describe*

On 01/26/2018 03:49 PM, David Fetter wrote:> They are indeed terse and
cryptic, and what's worse, they're not
> available to clients other than psql, so I propose that we do what at
> least MySQL, Oracle, and DB2 do and implement DESCRIBE as its own
> command.
>
> Especially handy would be a variant DESCRIBE CREATE, which would do
> what it says on the label in a copy-and-paste-able form, but that's
> not strictly necessary for the first cut.

I am not fan of this since I like how easy it is to explain to beginners
that all backslash commands are processed by the client while everything
else is handled by the server. Yes, "help" is an exception, but nobody
really needs to know about that command.

As for the actually proposal I do not care strongly either way. The \d
commands are a bit cryptic and unfriendly to the occasional user, but I
am not sure that having two ways to do it would be better.

Andreas