Re: newbie question... how do I get table structure?

that's great, I didn't know about the information schema... guess I
never read the 'what's new' document :)

On Fri, 2004-02-06 at 13:15, Tom Lane wrote:

> Franco Bruno Borghesi <franco(at)akyasociados(dot)com(dot)ar> writes:
> > Does anyone know if the ansi sql standard defines any way to do this?
> > I've seen the DESCRIBE TABLE/INDEX/... or SHOW TABLE/INDEX/... commands
> > in other databases, but I don't really know if they are extensions or
> > not.
>
> They are extensions (and very nonstandard ones at that). What the SQL
> standard provides are standardized views of the system catalogs located
> in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA schema. The per-spec way to do this would
> be something like
>
> select column_name, data_type
> from information_schema.columns
> where table_name = 'foo'
> order by ordinal_position;
>
> Now Postgres only got around to supporting the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views
> in 7.4 (although in principle you could have defined most of these views
> earlier, certainly in 7.3). I'm not real sure how many other DBs
> support INFORMATION_SCHEMA either ... it may not be all that "standard".
>
> regards, tom lane
>