Re: Bug in psql

On Sun, Feb 2, 2025 at 5:30 PM Chris BSomething <xpusostomos(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 at 04:36, David G. Johnston <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
>> Relations are a super-class of table-things. There are many subtypes of
>> relations. \d Lists relations of all subtypes. You can also add a single
>> letter to \d to limit the listing to only the subtype-specific relations.
>> That is what the E is doing here.
>>
>
> That's an obtuse answer. If everything is "a table thing", why even bother
> printing a title? Normally, select() doesn't show a title, so if you're
> just going to dump data to the screen with misleading titles, why bother
> with a garbage title? And how is \di, list indexes "table things"? You
> can't select from an index, so for users they're not relations.
>
>
You can quibble with our definitions but they probably aren't going to
change (and a bug report isn't the best place to try anyway). The glossary
says:

Relation
The generic term for all objects in a database that have a name and a list
of attributes defined in a specific order. Tables, sequences, views,
foreign tables, materialized views, composite types, and indexes are all
relations.

More generically, a relation is a set of tuples; for example, the result of
a query is also a relation.

And the design methodology given extends from that.

>
>> It seems to be another list of foreign tables but with a different format.
>>>
>>
>> Since \d can only show information limited to the super-class relation,
>> and not specific subtypes, the information for the foreign table subtype
>> needs to be made available somewhere. That place is \det
>>
>
> I don't know what that means, but when two menu items have the same text,
> but a different function, Houston, we have a problem.
>

I agree with this premise. It's still a matter of R&D to find the
violation and fix them - without confounding things with also tryIng to
declassify indexes as relations.

David J.