Re: SHOW TABLES

On Thu, 15 Jul 2010, 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?

One is an interface comamnd (ie. psql specific), the other is a generic
command for any interface ... \d doesn't work in perl or tcl or ... so,
for those, we're talking about adding a 'short form' (show tables), but if
someone wants to use the long form of querying multiple table s(or
information_schema), that option is still open to them ...

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