On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 09:14:48AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote: > The fact is that if you have 100 columns and want 95 of them, it's > very tedious to have to specify them all, especially for ad hoc > queries where the house SQL standards really don't matter that much. > It's made more tedious by the fact that there is no real help in > constructing the query. This gets particularly bad with views, which > developers often seem to stuff with every available column that > might be needed by some query instead of creating views tailored to > particular queries. Not long ago annoyance with this prompted my to > write a little utility function that would give me a query with all > the columns specified so I could cut and paste it, and delete the > columns I didn't want. (Another advantage is that the result is > guaranteed typo free, which my typing certainly is not.) See > <https://gist.github.com/818490>. It's far from perfect, but I still > find myself using it several times a month, mainly for the very > purpose intended by this suggested feature. >
As I do the ad hoc query thing more than I'd like to admit, I think there's a place for some form of negation for *. A workaround similar to what you describe here would be to add special tab completion to psql that would expand * to the full list (probably on double tab ...) Ross -- Ross Reedstrom, Ph.D. reeds...@rice.edu Systems Engineer & Admin, Research Scientist phone: 713-348-6166 Connexions http://cnx.org fax: 713-348-3665 Rice University MS-375, Houston, TX 77005 GPG Key fingerprint = F023 82C8 9B0E 2CC6 0D8E F888 D3AE 810E 88F0 BEDE -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
