Re: SHOW TABLES

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > I assume SHOW TABLES would only be useful for interactive terminal
> > > sesssions, not for application code (which should use
> > > information_schema), so what non-psql interactive terminal programs are
> > > there?
> > >
> > >   
> > 
> > I think your assumption is questionable.
> > 
> > Plenty of people use MySQL's "SHOW TABLES" in non-interactive settings 
> > (for good or ill). That's why any suggestion that we should return 
> > anything other than a resultset seems like a really terrible idea to me.
> 
> If they are writing an application, finding the query to show all tables
> is the least of their problems.  I don't see how SHOW TABLE
> significantly helps in that case, except make things 0.001% easier,
> while creating duplicate functionality in Postgres.

What would be interesting is if SHOW TABLES was psql-only, and showed
the output in multi-column format, like ls -C.  That would a a new
display format and new useful functionality.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + None of us is going to be here forever. +