Re: 7.4 Wishlist

> > SHOW
> > ----
> > 
> > I think 7.4 could and really should implement SHOW command similar to
> > MySQL. Listing tables/foreign keys/views and so isn't just psql problem,
> 
> Actually, in 7.4 I'd tell them to:
> 
> select * from information_schema.tables;
> 
> This is a far more portable method.

Yep. You know it was just a draft which wasn't actually meant to be
sent...

I think the contents of that information schema could and should be user
modifiable views...

I needed to administer one of my dbs on 7.3 from another computer with
psql 7.2.3 -- for the computer had PG 7.2.3 running, and \d on for example
views failed gratuituosly with error "relation pg_relcheck not found". Of
course the dumps, sql commands and tsv data etc. I needed were only on
that 7.2.3 machine...

Many interfaces need to enumerate tables & databases etc. I'm not
interested in having different versions of for example DBD::Pg... one, the
most up-to-date, version should do the job. Against whatever version of
postmaster I want to use it.

So maybe backwards compatibility could be introduced also (older clients &
applications against newer DBMS) by having different information schemas
for different client versions... don't know, how it should be actually
done. Maybe there would be schemas "info_compat_74", "info_compat_75"  
and "information_schema_80" in PostgreSQL 8.0 :P and "information_schema"  
could be alias to most appropriate of these, depending on client version
:) (dunno).

-- 
Antti Haapala 
+358 50 369 3535 
ICQ: #177673735