Re: Views, views, views: Summary of Arguments

Thomas, All,

> I guess I'm having difficulty understanding why the system catalogs
> themselves and provision of support for information_schema are not
> sufficient for what exists in core.

Because you can't answer the question: "What tables does user phil have update 
permissions on?" or "How many overloaded versions of function 
df_new_company() do I have?", and similar, without doing advanced queries on 
the system tables.   Queries which are prone to mistakes: earlier on this 
thread a *pgsql hacker* posted a sample system catalog query which contained 
a mistake.  Asking our general users to navigate the complexity of the system 
catalogs is just not good application practice.

I don't really think a "VPAN" is any kind of solution for this purpose (though 
I'd like it for other things).   The purpose of these views is to make 
PostgreSQL more user-friendly, and telling people: "Oh just go to 
http://name/of/obscure/site, lookup these 10 views, log in as superuser and 
load them and you're golden" is not much of an improvement in 
user-friendliness.

To reiterate my point previously:  these system views are NOT aimed at the 
people on *this* list; they are for the people on the -NOVICE and -GENERAL 
lists and IRC and the people who don't yet use PostgreSQL.  Please stop 
thinking exclusively in terms of whether they would be useful to you, 
personally.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco