Dimitri Fontaine <dfontaine(at)hi-media(dot)com> wrote:
> So what we'd need first is a series of named queries, which I
> think psql provides for.
Any solution which only works within psql isn't a solution for a
large part of the problem space people are trying to address. One
important goal is that if someone spends a day to whip up a GUI
query tool (as I did when I first started working in Java), it's
easy to get displays like we get from the psql backslash commands
(as it was in Sybase, which is what we were using at the time,
through sp_help and related stored procedures).
While the four DBAs use psql heavily, the twenty-some programmers
and the business analysts all use various GUI tools which either tie
in to their normal environments (for example, eclipse) or are web
based hacks which probably didn't take much more effort than the
above-mentioned GUI hack which I used for about ten years.
Backslash commands do them no good whatsoever, nor will any solution
which requires psql.
It would be nice if when I display information about a table or some
other database object, I could copy from my psql session, paste it
into an email, and they could replicate the behavior in squirrel (or
whatever the heck else they happen to be running).
-Kevin