Re: SHOW TABLES

* Heikki Linnakangas (heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com) wrote:
> I'm not sure I buy that, but even if it's true, it doesn't seem fair to
> do a favor to one group of users, leaving the rest stranded and excluded
> forever. Even if SHOW TABLES has a bigger mind-share than the others,
> surely the others are not negligible either.

Have to say that I don't believe we're under any obligation to be "fair"
to the users of various other RDBMS'. I hate MySQL with a passion, and
originally came from an Oracle background, but I have to say that
'show tables;' makes a heck of alot more sense to me than 'desc'.

> I'm suggesting that we should just add the hint for all of those and be
> done with it.

I do think it'd be useful to have a top-level set of 'show' commands. I
agree with the others that the approach of saying "well, if you just
query pg_class joined against pg_namespace and filter out what you don't
want", etc, etc, is way more complicated than it really needs to be. I
can think of some applications where I would have actually used it
(simple perl scripts and the like).

I'm not sure how I feel about something like "select * from (show
tables) where table_name = 'blah';"...

> :-). They're not that bad IMHO. \d is short, which is nice. \d and \df
> are the commands I routinely use and remember, for anything more
> advanced I have to resort to \h. The SHOW TABLES command wouldn't do
> more than that anyway.

I don't find them all that bad either, really. I do find myself doing
things like "psql -c '\d';" in scripts and whatnot on occation, which
isn't exactly ideal either. :)

Thanks,

Stephen