Re: Can we go beyond the standard to make Postgres radically better?

The complaint is not about complex queries, or CTEs, or Joins. This is
about simple queries where a user wants to discover - surf - the database
and look into specific tables, but exclude certain columns. More specifically,
this is when the user types in interactive queries.

There is already something very similar to what you are describing:

https://www.psycopg.org/docs/cursor.html

Each cursor has its description, which consists of the column descriptions. Basically, it's like doing \d on a cursor. Unfortunately, it's not interactive, one has to do some pythong programming in order do to that. Unfortunately, it is not possible to just "describe the cursor", the description becomes available after the "execute" call. Hopefully, I understood you correctly.

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Mladen Gogala
Database Consultant
Tel: (347) 321-1217
https://dbwhisperer.wordpress.com