Re: Retail DDL

On Mon, 2025-08-18 at 09:57 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres(at)jeltef(dot)nl> writes:
>
> > I have wanted this MANY times. I've had this as a PG user: I think
> > it's literally the first thing I did when connecting to a Postgres
> > server the first time. Coming from MySQL, I wanted to see the exact
> > table definition, and there it was as easy as "DESCRIBE some_table".
>
> You haven't actually defined what "this" is. For starters, do you
> really want this output to be included in \d? Seems like one part
> or the other of such output would be clutter, so I'd be more minded
> to leave \d alone and invent some new command. (By analogy to \sf,
> maybe \st and so on?)
>
> But the real issue is what to print. In the case of a table, should
> we also show its indexes? What about foreign keys to or from other
> tables? If it's a partitioned table, what about the partitions?
> I'm not sure this is as simple as it seems.

Right, that is the hard problem.
We have had this discussion before, e.g. in
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAFEN2wxsDSSuOvrU03CE33ZphVLqtyh9viPp6huODCDx2UQkYA%40mail.gmail.com

Yours,
Laurenz Albe