Re: Are there commands to enquire about table structure?

"Ben" <reply(at)to-the-newsgroup(dot)com> writes:

> On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 02:22:09 +0000, Lee Harr wrote:
>
>> In 7.4 anyhow, I bet you can do much of this with the
>> information_schema. This one would be ...
>>
>> SELECT count(*)
>> FROM information_schema.columns
>> WHERE table_name='mytable';
>
> Sounds very good; however, the DB in question is 7.3.2 - no such namespace
> exists there. If we can get the IP people to sign off on upgrading, I'll
> look into this mechanism. We've got megabytes of SQL designed for
> Postgres, though, and any changes have to be vetted against the whole
> system before we can use them, something that takes many months.

For 7.3, the info you need is available in the system catalogs, which
have a somewhat hairier layout than the SQL-standard information_schema.

-Doug