Re: Re: proposal - psql: possibility to specify sort for describe commands, when size is printed

2017-03-10 16:00 GMT+01:00 Alexander Korotkov <a(dot)korotkov(at)postgrespro(dot)ru>:

> On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
>
>> * Peter Eisentraut (peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
>> > On 2/24/17 16:32, Pavel Stehule wrote:
>> > > set EXTENDED_DESCRIBE_SORT size_desc
>> > > \dt+
>> > > \l+
>> > > \di+
>> > >
>> > > Possible variants: schema_table, table_schema, size_desc, size_asc
>> >
>> > I can see this being useful, but I think it needs to be organized a
>> > little better.
>> >
>> > Sort key and sort direction should be separate settings.
>> >
>> > I'm not sure why we need to have separate settings to sort by schema
>> > name and table name. But if we do, then we should support that for all
>> > object types. I think maybe that's something we shouldn't get into
>> > right now.
>> >
>> > So I would have one setting for sort key = {name|size} and on for sort
>> > direction = {asc|desc}.
>>
>> Perhaps I'm trying to be overly cute here, but why not let the user
>> simply provide a bit of SQL to be put at the end of the query?
>>
>> That is, something like:
>>
>> \pset EXTENDED_DESCRIBE_ORDER_LIMIT 'ORDER BY 5 DESC LIMIT 10'
>>
>
> I think that's the question of usability. After all, one can manually
> type corresponding SQL instead of \d* commands. However, it's quite
> cumbersome to do this every time.
> I found quite useful to being able to switch between different sortings
> quickly. For instance, after seeing tables sorted by name, user can
> require them sorted by size descending, then sorted by size ascending,
> etc...
> Therefore, I find user-defined SQL clause to be cumbersome. Even psql
> variable itself seems to be cumbersome for me.
> I would propose to add sorting as second optional argument to \d*
> commands. Any thoughts?
>

This proposal was here already - maybe two years ago. The psql command
parser doesn't allow any complex syntax - more - the more parameters in one
psql commands is hard to remember, hard to read.

With my proposal, and patch I would to cover following use case. It is real
case. Anytime when we used \dt+ in psql we needed sort by size desc. When
we should to see a size, then the top is interesting. This case is not
absolute, but very often, so I would to create some simple way, how to do
some parametrization (really simple).

Pavel

>
> ------
> Alexander Korotkov
> Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com
> The Russian Postgres Company
>