Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> Kevin Grittner wrote:
>> I can't picture anything which could be done with views which
>> would allow me to issue one statement and see everything of
>> interest about a table (etc.). You know: tablespace, owner,
>> permissions, columns, primary key, foreign keys, check
>> constraints, exclusion constraints, ancestor tables, child
>> tables, and whatever interesting features I missed or we later
>> add. Other products allow that to be generated server-side, so
>> that it is available to any and all clients. I think we should
>> join the crowd in this respect.
>
> Consider if the server-side description comes to the client
> unformatted, then that format is going to changes as Postgres adds
> features, and that might really make the output useless except for
> raw display purposes.
Yeah, sending it back as unformatted text would be horrible. See
this post:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-07/msg00738.php
If you follow the link there, you will see examples of another
product returning up to 11 result sets and a few INFO level messages
in response to a single "sp_help objectname". If it's technically
feasible for PostgreSQL to do something like that, it would
absolutely rock. Result sets have enough structure to them to be
able to write code dealing with such behavior with relative
confidence.
For more naive ramblings by me on the topic, see:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-07/msg00752.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-07/msg00892.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-07/msg00909.php
Nobody has yet come out and said that these ideas *aren't*
technically feasible, so I continue to live with my dreams intact.
So far....
-Kevin