Re: Views, views, views: Summary of Arguments

On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 01:23:17AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Thomas F. O'Connell" <tfo(at)sitening(dot)com> writes:
> > I think it's important to consider the perspective of both developers
> > and users, and the internal views clearly creates issues for the
> > developers.
>
> 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.
>

Would you rather help hone a set of PostgreSQL views or answer
and correct every single dba and tool developer who needs to have the
system catalog entity-relationship diagram (exists?) explained in detail
in order to access system catalogs accurately. You obviously have no
trouble throwing together system catalog queries, but this is not
true of the general user base. It should also be acknowledged that
the system catalogs are adequate, useful and obtuse.

Also, if you do not trust the newsysview team to develop good views
(with input for hackers), how can you possibly expect every dba and tool
maker to access the system catalog in a consistent and accurate manner.

If everyone is rolling their own queries into the system catalog, there
is a lot of room for error and inconsistency between tools. I believe tool
developers will confirm this.

It would be better to spend time to work on really good system views and
allow people build on them, starting from a higher level than the
system catalogs.

elein
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