Re: SHOW TABLES

On 16/07/10 20:11, Rob Wultsch wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Robert Haas<robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> For committers.
>
> Perhaps this discussions should be moved to the General list in order
> to poll the userbase.
>
> My .02 is that SHOW commands (even if they are not compatible) would
> make it much easier for me to make an argument to my boss to at least
> consider moving off another open source database. The show commands
> are in *very* widespread use by the MySQL community even after ~5
> years of having the i_s. The Drizzle team (a radical fork of MySQL)
> very briefly considered removing the SHOW commands and the unanimous
> objections that followed caused that idea to scrapped.

That's for MySQL. I come from a DB2 background, and when I started using
psql years ago, I often typed "LIST TABLES" without thinking much about
it. Not SHOW TABLES, but LIST TABLES.

I bet Oracle users coming to PostgreSQL will try "DESC". Not SHOW
TABLES. As Simon listed, every DBMS out there has a different syntax for
this.

I have nothing against SHOW TABLES (it might cause conflicts in grammar
though), but if we're going to cater to people migrating from MySQL, I
feel we should cater to people migrating from other products too. But
surely we're not going to implement 10 different syntaxes for the same
thing! We could, however, give a hint in the syntax error in all those
cases. That way we're not on the hook to maintain them forever, and we
will be doing people a favor by introducing them to the backslash
commands or information schema, which are more powerful.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com