TODO: You can alter it, but you can't view it

All,

While working on some database maintenance, I was just tripped up by the
fact that there is no good way to query reloptions for tables. By "no
good way" I mean "no way which does not involve UNNEST and regexps or
procedural code".

This puts us in the wierd place that while one can ALTER various
reloptions, one cannot check them to see if they *need* to be altered.
That's a particularly bad situation given that changing reloptions
requires a lock on the table (though less of one in 9.1).

I propose that we have an additional system view, pg_class_reloptions
(or pg_table_reloptions if reloptions aren't relevant for views and
indexes). It would have the following columns:

relid
name
setting_numeric
setting_boolean
setting_text

comments/objections/something I missed in the internal functions or 9.1
patches which already does this?

--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com