Re: SHOW TABLES

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 18:59, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 18:43 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 18:35, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 17:38 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> >
>> >> Is there an actual common use-case for having these commands available
>> >> for *non-psql* interfaces?
>> >
>> > There are many interfaces out there and people writing new ones
>> > everyday. We just wrote an interface for Android, for example.
>> >
>> > It is arguably *more* important to do this from non-psql interfaces.
>> >
>> > There should be one command to "display a list of tables" and it needs
>> > to be easily guessable for those who have forgotten.
>>
>> The downside is that you are then limited to what can be returned as a
>> resultset. A "\d table" in psql returns a hell of a lot more than
>> that. So do we keep two separate formats for this? Or do we remove the
>> current, useful, output format in favor of a much worse formt just to
>> support more clients?
>
> I imagined that we would do something similar to EXPLAIN, a set of text
> rows returned.

Wouldn't that be useless for the case when an app wants to use it? An
app will require it to be structured somehow.

There's a reason we made EXPLAIN output data structured now. But I
guess you could define an XML/JSON schema and return it in that...

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/