Re: Switching from MySQL -- Missing DESCRIBE table, SHOW

On Oct 17, 2005, at 8:31 , Gan Uesli Starling wrote:

> I wrote:
>
>> But alas, two of the most useful commands appear to be missing:
>> SHOW TABLES
>> DESCRIBE table
>> Inasmuch as my prototyping DB is on my NetBSD server at home while
>> my data waiting to be 'based is at work...such that I have to
>> connect via Perl/DBI and XML-RPC (not psql, alas).
>>
>
> Sorry to be over-verbose. The stress is on remote access via Perl/DBI
> and XML-RPC. Those are my ONLY available routes. I do NOT have psql at
> work...which is the problem.
>
> I have to submit ordinary SQL queries. In MySQL they had such queries,
> namely the two stated above.

If you read Oliver's response again, you'll see that he gave you a
method to do this, namely, using the SQL-standard Information Schema.
For more information on using the Information Schema in PostgreSQL, see
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/information-schema.html

An advantage of using the Information Schema is that it is SQL-
standard, and should be portable to databases that support this
aspect of the standard, rather than vendor-specific commands such as
DESCRIBE and SHOW.

Hope this helps.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com