Re: Standard metadata queries

On Apr 24, 2008, at 1:01 PM, Steve Atkins wrote:
> I've been chatting with the Trolltech folks about the  
> implementation of the Qt wrapper around libpq, and the issue of how  
> to properly do metadata queries came up. That is things like "What  
> are the column names and types of the primary key of this table,  
> and what index enforces it?" or "What are the names and types of  
> each field of this table?".
>
> These seem like queries that'll be used by a lot of people, hidden  
> down in ORMs and access libraries, and which are hard to get right,  
> let alone efficient, and which will generally be written by one  
> person (developing the ORM or library) and likely not touched again.
>
> Is there a standard set of well-crafted implementations of these  
> anywhere that could be used by all the interface and ORM  
> developers? If not, would it make sense to put some together and  
> document or wiki them? Both as example code and as a set of good,  
> solid queries that library developers can cut and paste.
>
> (The implementation I'm looking at right now has, amongst other  
> things, hardwired OID-to-type mappings, and there's got to be a  
> cleaner way than that).


Take a look at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/newsysviews/
-- 
Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect  decibel@decibel.org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828