Re: Views, views, views! (long)

Actually bad and good are appropriate. The structure
of the system catalogs dates back to the grad student's
theses and is not really good. But it is stable and
does the job. It really is not user friendly, however.

I reassert that I have seen only one decent schema drawing
of the system catalogs and it is obtuse at best. The
short comings wrt user friendliness in the system catalogs
cannot be adequately handled by better documentation.
The complex queries people will have to write to extract
the information means that each person will have to write their
own set of system views, correctly or not. This is the
current state of affairs.

With regards to the backslash commands, yes, let us improve
them! And by the way, the same views and queries will have
to be written for improved backslash commands are the same
as are being written for the newsysviews. The additional interface
of SQL is also imperative for interfaces that want to
create scripts and/or do operations on the data found
in the system catalog. e.g. drop all foreign keys linked
to table foo.

Elein
elein(at)varlena(dot)com

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 09:22:40PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Tom, Andrew, Robert,
>
> > More to the point: how can you build a "good" interface on top of a
> > "bad" one? Whatever fundamental shortcomings exist in the latter cannot
> > be hidden by the former.
>
> I think "bad" and "good" are pretty irrelevant myself. The system tables are
> very "good" at what they do: support the postgresql code base. They are not
> *meant* to be user-friendly. That's why we need a different "interface" to
> be "good" for a different purpose. Which is what we're trying to do.
>
> --
> Josh Berkus
> Aglio Database Solutions
> San Francisco
>
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