Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql

Tom Lane wrote:
> 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.)

yeah requiring a prefix would make it completely pointless

>
> 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.

well providing a hint that one should use different command will only
lead to the path "uhm why not make it work as well" - and we also need
to recongnized that our replacements for some of those commands are not
really equivalent in most cases.

>
> 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.

well those are the most common ones I guess for the current version of
the mysql commandline client - but what about future versions or the
fact that we only have partial replacements for some of those that
people are really asking for?

Stefan