Re: \d type queries - why not views in system catalog?!?

Oh!

That's an excellent idea.  Seemingly addresses the issue and has
value-add.  I'm not aware of any gotchas here.  Is there something that
is being overlooked?


Greg


On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 14:50, Robert Treat wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 11:28, greg@turnstep.com wrote:
> > 
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> > 
> > > Wouldn't it be easier (and more portable, see 7.3/7.2 system catalogs vs. 
> > > psql) to have views for that? Do I miss a point here?
> > 
> > Putting the \d commands into views has been on the TODO list for a long time: 
> > I think it is actually the only psql-related item left, until we change 
> > the backend protocol to indicate transaction state. I don't think a view 
> > would have helped with the psql 7.2/7.3 change: a lot more changed than 
> > simply the underlying SQL.
> > 
> > Some of the the backslash commands are not amenable to putting inside a 
> > view, as they actually compromise multiple SQL calls and some logic in 
> > the C code, but a few could probably be made into views. Could whomever 
> > added that particular TODO item expand on this?
> > 
> 
> One idea I've always thought would be nice would be to make full fledged
> C functions out of the \ commands and ship them with the database. This
> way the \ commands could just be alias to "select myfunc()".  This would
> help out all of us who write GUI interfaces since we would have standard
> functions we could call upon, and would also help with backward
> compatibility since \dv could always call select list_views(), which
> would already be included with each server. One of the reasons that this
> was not feasible in the past was that we needed functions that could
> return multiple rows and columns easily. Now that we have that in 7.3,
> it might be worth revisiting. 
> 
> Robert Treat 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Greg Copeland <greg@copelandconsulting.net>
Copeland Computer Consulting