Re: psql \d option list overloaded

On Sun, 11 Jan 2004, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> Another problem with pushing psql's queries into the backend is that
> much of the output that psql makes is not a single table. Sometimes
> there is more than one table, or the information is in the table
> footers.

Yes, pushing the \xx commands into the server makes no sense to me at all.

The commands in psql are very specific for psql. I don't see why you ever
want to do SHOW TABLES except at the command line in psql. If your
application wants to find all tables in the database, then we have the
standard sql way, which is the information schema.

The argument that "show tables" is easier to remember then \dt might be
true, but to me that just means that we should make psql better by adding
\describe_table and such, not to push psql code into the server.

Making a couple of views that are pg specific to make it easier to get
information out could be good however. The information schema does not
always contain all information one might want. Making specialised SQL
commands for it I'm not in favor of at all.

--
/Dennis Björklund