Re: Summary of DDL/DML statement return/output values?

Yeah I wouldn't say it's worth putting effort in over something that just
returns the command name, but the other cases do have some variety to them
and would probably be a benefit. I found INSERT to be very odd until I saw
its explanation (the OIDs legacy thing).

Is there a command that returns more than one line of input, for example?
Other than a SELECT or a DML with a RETURNING clause, of course.

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 4:01 PM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
wrote:

> On 2020-Jun-23, Steve Estes wrote:
>
> > Thanks Alvaro. Looks cool. So, on the one hand it'd be nice to be able
> to
> > auto-generate this once all the commands are standardized into one
> > structure. That'd be slick.
>
> I thought they were already standardized ... But anyway, I was thinking
> that this would generate *one* table listing all commands with their
> tags. I was not thinking in putting the tag in each command's page:
> I'm not sure that that would be generatable.
>
> > On the other hand, the number of commands in SQL is not that large a
> > universe, such that it'd be at least somewhat practical to just add
> Output
> > as a standard section of the doc page for any command. They number 182
> in
> > both v11, v12 and v13 thus far, and many of those are variations of
> ALTER,
> > CREATE or DROP (127 of them, in fact), such that they probably mostly
> share
> > an output format. More importantly, the output of each command is
> unlikely
> > to change much going forward, certainly not within a major release
> > (right?). So we could just document each command's output, and if need
> be
> > then pull that information into a summary page thereafter, or when the
> > commit you mention is finished.
>
> I can't say I'm terribly excited about this idea. I won't stop you if
> you want to pursue it, but I'm not sure I see the value in a RETURN
> VALUE section that says that the command returns the command name.
> Maybe it would make sense to have that for the exceptional cases only?
>
> --
> Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
> PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
>