Greg, > Well, who really *does* need these? After all, end users should be > using an interface of some sort. (DBD::Pg, phpPgAdmin, psql, etc). It's > the job of the people writing those interfaces to know the system > catalogs well and present them to the users in a pretty fashion. If > people want an "easy" way to look up the information, they use an > interface. If not, they should learn the system catalogs. > /devilsadvocate
Well, because of who worked on it we were primarily thinking of custom applications developers and integrators, who fall somewhere between "dumb user" and "pg hacker", and thus need an interface which falls between "pgAdmin" and "pg_class". Also database designers (not all database designers like using GUIs). And, as Lance points out, these system views would help as a diagnostic view for support engineers. Actually, I'll second that; I've had cause to recommend the CVS system views more than a dozen times to pgsql newbies on IRC. For example, there is an easy query you can do using the new system views (thanks, Andrew!) to check what unindexed foriegn keys you have. So, "who would they be useful to?" is "everyone *except* the people on this list." -- --Josh Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings