Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql

Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com> writes:
> That being said, I don't have much of an opinion, so if you see a
> problem, then we can forget it. After all, we would need some kind of a
> prefix anyway to avoid conflicting with actual SQL... maybe "\m"? And
> that defeats a lot of the purpose.

Yeah, requiring a prefix would make it completely pointless I think.
The submitted patch tries to avoid that by only matching syntax that's
invalid in Postgres, but that certainly limits how far we can go with
it. (And like you, I'm a bit worried about the LOAD case.)

The last go-round on this was just a couple months ago:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2009-11/msg00241.php
although I guess that was aimed at a slightly different idea,
namely making "show databases" etc actually *work*. This one at
least has a level of complication that's more in keeping with the
possible gain.

The previous discussion started from the idea that only DESCRIBE,
SHOW DATABASES/TABLES, and USE were worth worrying about. If we
were to agree that we'd go that far and no farther, the potential
conflict with SQL syntax would be pretty limited. I have little
enough experience with mysql to not want to opine too much on how
useful that would be, but it does seem like those are commands
I use right away anytime I am using mysql.

regards, tom lane