Re: Can we go beyond the standard to make Postgres radically better?

On 10/02/2022 18:22, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
> On 2022-02-09 21:14:39 -0800, Guyren Howe wrote:
>> Postgres has since the outset gone beyond the SQL standard in many ways :
>> types, inheritance, programmability, generality are all well beyond what SQL
>> used to mandate and still well beyond the current standard.
>>
>> There are huge developer benefits available to focusing more on making a great
>> relational programming environment, well outside the SQL standard.
>>
>> Examples of small things Postgres could have:
>>
>> • SELECT * - b.a_id from a natural join b
>> □ let me describe a select list by removing fields from a relation. In
>> the example, I get all fields in the join of a and b other than the
>> shared key, which I only get once.
> Natural join already does this.
>
> My use case for such a feature are tables which contain one column (or a
> small number of columns) which you usually don't want to select: A bytea
> column or a very wide text column. In a program I don't mind (in fact I
> prefer) listing all the columns explicitely, but exploring a database
> interactively with psql typing lots of column names is tedious
> (especially since autocomplete doesn't work here).

Maybe for this specific use case it's easier to teach psql how to do that,
instead of trying to amend the SQL implementation? Example:

SELECT * \- col1 \- col2 FROM table

psql looks up the columns, translates * into the actual list minus these two
columns and lets you continue entering the query.

Regards,

--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group
European PostgreSQL User Group - Board of Directors
Volunteer Regional Contact, Germany - PostgreSQL Project