Re: Switching from MySQL -- Missing DESCRIBE table, SHOW

I wrote:
> But alas, two of the most useful commands appear to be missing:
>
> SHOW TABLES
> DESCRIBE table
>
> Inasmuch as my prototyping DB is on my NetBSD server at home while my
> data waiting to be 'based is at work...such that I have to connect via
> Perl/DBI and XML-RPC (not psql, alas).

Sorry to be over-verbose. The stress is on remote access via Perl/DBI
and XML-RPC. Those are my ONLY available routes. I do NOT have psql at
work...which is the problem.

I have to submit ordinary SQL queries. In MySQL they had such queries,
namely the two stated above.

Nor can I SSh or any other tunneling protocol so as to even talk to
psql on the NetBSD box from behind the corporate firewall. All I have to
work with are ports 80 and 443.

So I wrote an XML-RPC server/client pair to talk to my box through the
firewall, via port 443 (SSL) on my Apache server and making use of Perl
DBI. But it limits me to ordinary SQL queries. And for that there are no
nifty \dt or any such like.

On MySQL they had such ordinary SQL queries. Via any CGI script I could
do 'SHOW TABLES' (the same as 'SELECT * FROM foobar' and cousins) and it
would just work.

Are there no such exploratory SQL queries for PostgreSQL that I can use
without having psql? I even went to the source code for psql, as per the
FAQ but those were so complicated as to be no use at all over Perl/DBI.

Thanks again,

Gan Starling
Kalamazoo MI USQA