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Robert Haas (robertmh...@gmail.com) wrote: > I think "LIST COMMENTS ON SYSTEM AGGREGATES" would be an epic > step forward in usability. Perhaps. But it would behoove you to come up with a less er... arcane example. I've been using Postgres a long time, and I can count the number of times I've needed to see comments on system aggregates on my hand. With at least four fingers left over. ... > in the "alphabet soup" paragraph above. I don't think there's > anything WRONG with letting "\dFp" show text search dictionaries and > "\dfwS+" list system window functions with additional detail - but I'd > like an alternative that emphasizes ease of remembering over brevity, > works in every client, and can be extended in whatever reasonable ways > the community decides are worth having. ... I don't know that I'd necessarily remember all those any better, and would certainly not enjoy typing out: LIST TEST SEARCH DICTIONARIES I don't have to remember \dFp - all I have to remember is \?. For the more common ones that I use day to day and don't have to look up (\d \dt \df \l etc.) the advantage of a two or three character string is strong. (There is some devil's advocate in there - a standard cross client (and dare I say it, cross RDBMS?) way would be nice) ... > being powerful rings totally hollow for me. For ordinary, day to day > tasks like listing all my tables, or looking at the details of a > particular table, they're great. I use them all the time and would > still use them even if some other syntax were available. But there is > no reasonable way to pass options to them, and that to me is a pretty > major drawback. Well, there's the rub. You're arguing this from a hacker's persepective, while the SHOW syntax seems to be overwhelmingly agreed upon to be either helpful for clueless noobs, or some nice syntactic sugar for average users. > I'm not sure where to draw the line but implementing a proper shortcut > interface for cammands is something taht should be done on the client side > because not every client is the same and the needs of psql might be > radically different from any other client (like pgadmin or a fancy Web 2.0 > AJAX thingy - those will likely always use custom catalog queries). > Maybe a differnet way to look at the whole thing is to reconsider our own > catalogs (anyone remember newsysview?) and add a bunch of views to abstract > away most of the current complexity for these usecases? Yep, agreed. Now, if we can just agree to put information_schema in the default search_path, because nobody enjoys having to type out "information_schema"... - -- Greg Sabino Mullane g...@turnstep.com End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/ PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 201007191021 http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iEYEAREDAAYFAkxEYDgACgkQvJuQZxSWSsikFwCdGo88Ehdcm8OHi2+VxISTG60Y b9sAoLsetxcpdMSconsCwj+3Xa1fCCzo =3aM1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
