Re: [HACKERS] psql Week 3

> >Very cool. Nice new formats. Man, I will have to add them to this
> >book. I am going to have to have pre-7.0 psql backslash command
> >listings, and 7.0 backslash listings. This improvement is long overdue.
> >psql has always been one of our nifty features. It just got niftier.
>
> My previous database experience was with PICK, where the data dictionaries
> include an output format and the command language allows for column
> formatting 'on the fly'. This is something that I have missed with
> PostgreSQL, though I believe the SQL standard does not cover it.

I had that with Progress. Yes, it was handy.

>
> What I would like would be the ability to attach a format to a column, so
> that text could be truncated at 25 characters or floats lined up with a

char(25)?

> specified number of decimal places. (May be we can already and I've missed

numeric(16,2)?

> it?) I would particularly like to be able to do text wrapping within a
> column and totalling of numeric columns:

>
> -----+---------------------+--------
> id | description | qty
> -----+---------------------+--------
> abc1 | text that rambles | 35.43
> | on and on about |
> | something or other |
> def2 | more useless text | 2.00
> hgf3 | and yet more text | 355.10
> | to read |
> -----+---------------------+--------
> | | 392.53
> -----+---------------------+--------
> (3 rows)
>
> Do you think there's any place for this in PostgreSQL? Perhaps it needs a
> separate front-end tool.

That's a job for pgaccess. I thought it did stuff like that. If you
want printing like that, we need a report-writer, which is an important
application.

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