>Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: > You think that the users of the libpq() interface (or even the > protocol itself) are going to handle getting \dt-type output back > somehow..? If you look back in the thread, you'll see that I admitted my ignorance of whether this could be properly implemented in the back end without a protocol change. Ignorance being bliss, I can revel in the dreams of *having* such a feature without being dragged down by the potential pain of its implementation. ;-) I know, though, that the JDBC spec supports such things -- you can keep pulling ResultSet objects off the wire, each with its own distinct set of columns. (That is, each ResultSet has its own ResultSetMetaData which specifies how many columns that particular ResultSet has, what the column names are, what the data type is for each column, etc. Each ResultSet returned from a response stream for a request can be entirely different in all of these characteristics.) > As what, a single-column result of type text? No, that would be horrible. That has been mentioned as a possibility, and it makes me shudder. > And then they'll use non-fixed-width fonts, undoubtably, which > means the results will end up looking rather ugly, even if we put > in the effort to format the results. With, for example, Sybase's sp_help, each result set can be listed any way the client chooses -- I've seen it put into character format like the psql \d commands, I've seen each result set put into a table for brower-based query tools, and I've seen each result set put into a JTable for Java Swing applications. If a client gets back a series of result sets, the sky is the limit. -Kevin
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