Re: SHOW TABLES

2010/7/16 Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>:
> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>
>>
>> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> > I assume SHOW TABLES would only be useful for interactive terminal
>> > sesssions, not for application code (which should use
>> > information_schema), so what non-psql interactive terminal programs are
>> > there?
>> >
>> >
>>
>> I think your assumption is questionable.
>>
>> Plenty of people use MySQL's "SHOW TABLES" in non-interactive settings
>> (for good or ill). That's why any suggestion that we should return
>> anything other than a resultset seems like a really terrible idea to me.
>
> If they are writing an application, finding the query to show all tables
> is the least of their problems.  I don't see how SHOW TABLE
> significantly helps in that case, except make things 0.001% easier,
> while creating duplicate functionality in Postgres.

I am thinking same too. Maybe somebody will be happy, bacause they can
to write SHOW TABLES, but they will be unsatisfied when will try to
write SHOW TABLES WHERE ... so only full support of MySQL syntax has
sense. Some only text version of SHOW TABLES command isn't sense for
me - it can do only more problems with incompatibility.

Still I thinking about top level hook - so these and similar commands
can be implemented inside external modules.

I have a different opinion on DESCRIBE command. This really can help.
But it must not be a command. "describe" function is enought -

select describe(oid);
select describe_table(name);
...

Regards

Pavel Stehule

>
> --
>  Bruce Momjian  <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>        http://momjian.us
>  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com
>
>  + None of us is going to be here forever. +
>
> --
> Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org)
> To make changes to your subscription:
> http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
>