Re: SHOW TABLES

On Jul 16, 2010, at 7:43 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>
>> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>> I assume SHOW TABLES would only be useful for interactive terminal
>>> sesssions, not for application code (which should use
>>> information_schema), so what non-psql interactive terminal programs are
>>> there?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I think your assumption is questionable.
>>
>> Plenty of people use MySQL's "SHOW TABLES" in non-interactive settings
>> (for good or ill). That's why any suggestion that we should return
>> anything other than a resultset seems like a really terrible idea to me.
>
> If they are writing an application, finding the query to show all tables
> is the least of their problems. I don't see how SHOW TABLE
> significantly helps in that case, except make things 0.001% easier,
> while creating duplicate functionality in Postgres.

Many years ago I needed to write a program that needed to be able to fetch a list of tables in the DB, and then a list of attributes for each table. It took me at least a full day and I almost gave up and abandoned PostgreSQL as a result. I think calling this duplicate functionality is ridiculous. Sure, it's possible. In fact, it's very easy.

For committers.

...Robert