Since I discovered the facilities in Postgres for providing and listing column descrptions, I have found them very useful, especially for adding a string showing physical units to my columns. For example:

\d+ cat
                      Table "public.cat"
     Column      |       Type       | Modifiers | Description
-----------------+------------------+-----------+--------------
 src_num         | integer          |           |
 ra              | double precision |           | deg
 decl            | double precision |           | deg
 radec_err       | real             |           | arcsec
 lii             | double precision |           | deg
 bii             | double precision |           | deg
 pn_cts          | real             |           | counts

However if one performs a JOIN creating a new table, all these descriptions fail to transfer. I haven't been able to find any easy way of propagating the descriptions - would it be a useful facility to have them propagated automatically? I would have thought that things like units would be useful even in many scientific applications, e.g. to have monetary columns described as dollars/pounds/euros or whatever.


--
Clive Page
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.


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