On 10/02/2022 18:22, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
On 2022-02-09 21:14:39 -0800, Guyren Howe wrote:
Postgres has since the outset gone beyond the SQL standard in many ways :
types, inheritance, programmability, generality are all well beyond what SQL
used to mandate and still well beyond the current standard.
There are huge developer benefits available to focusing more on making a great
relational programming environment, well outside the SQL standard.
Examples of small things Postgres could have:
• SELECT * - b.a_id from a natural join b
□ let me describe a select list by removing fields from a relation. In
the example, I get all fields in the join of a and b other than the
shared key, which I only get once.
Natural join already does this.
My use case for such a feature are tables which contain one column (or a
small number of columns) which you usually don't want to select: A bytea
column or a very wide text column. In a program I don't mind (in fact I
prefer) listing all the columns explicitely, but exploring a database
interactively with psql typing lots of column names is tedious
(especially since autocomplete doesn't work here).
Maybe for this specific use case it's easier to teach psql how to do that,
instead of trying to amend the SQL implementation? Example:
SELECT * \- col1 \- col2 FROM table
psql looks up the columns, translates * into the actual list minus these two
columns and lets you continue entering the query.
Regards,
--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group
European PostgreSQL User Group - Board of Directors
Volunteer Regional Contact, Germany - PostgreSQL Project
