Re: patch: Allow \dd to show constraint comments

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Alvaro Herrera
> <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
>> Hmm, if we're going to have pg_comments as a syntactic sugar kind of
>> thing, it should output things in format immediately useful to the user,
>> i.e. relation/column/etc names and not OIDs. �The OIDs would force you
>> to do lots of joins just to make it readable.

> Well, that's basically what this is doing.  See the objname/objtype
> columns.  It's intended that the output of this view should match the
> format that COMMENT takes as input.  But propagating the OIDs through
> is sensible as well, because sometimes people may want to do other
> joins, filtering, etc.

Is it also propagating the catalog OID through?  Because joining on OID
alone is not to be trusted.

I tend to agree with Alvaro's viewpoint here: anybody who wants to deal
directly in OIDs is better off joining directly to pg_description, and
not going through the rather large overhead that this view is going to
impose.  So we should just make this a purely user-friendly view and be
done with it, not try to create an amalgam that serves neither purpose
well.
        regards, tom lane