Re: SHOW TABLES

On Jul 16, 2010, at 8:11 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:

> On Fri, 2010-07-16 at 14:07 +0100, Thom Brown wrote:
>
>> The problem is people are stating different requirements.
>>
>> - to make it easy for new users of psql
>> - to simplify fetching basic database information from any client application
>> - to ease transition between MySQL and PostgreSQL
>
> Close, but I didn't state any of those as you have them.
>
> I want to make it easy for newbies to get access to obvious things like
> a list of tables, from *any* interactive application, wherever they
> exist. There are many and various apps and not all of them work the
> same. (The Windows installer ships two, for example). It would be nice
> to tell people "just type SHOW TABLES" and have it be true 100% of the
> time. They can remember that, or at least will try it if they can't
> remember anything at all about our RDBMS.

In pretty much any GUI application the expected way to see a list
of tables is not going to involve typing anything anywhere. Either
the list of tables is going to be shown all the time (common) or
there'll be a menu or toolbar option to show them.

There may not be anywhere obvious to type in a command, and if there is
the output of a server-side implementation of show tables would
likely be displayed like the contents of a table, rather than as
names of tables - so all the metadata is going to be off. Things
like the context menu for each row of the result having operations
for modifying the contents of a table, rather than the operations
for modifying a table. It'll offer DML operations where you'd expect,
and want, DDL in other words.

Cheers, Steve