On Apr 24, 2008, at 2:22 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Steve Atkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
On Apr 24, 2008, at 11:12 AM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
I believe the information_schema is standard.
Standard, but woefully incomplete (by design).
Sure, because it's restricted to standardized concepts. Do the
adapters
in question need to obtain info about nonstandard things? One would
hope that they're trying to confine themselves to SQL-standard stuff.
Types and indexes are two things that are commonly needed that
aren't covered well by information_schema.
Also, AIUI, it's fairly slow in use, compared to touching the
underlying
postgresql-specific tables, which would be something that you might
not care about in design tools but which might be a problem for use
in
an ORM or similar.
This is a fair point, and it's unlikely ever to be fixed completely,
though perhaps we could put a bit more effort into whichever views are
considered performance-critical.
If it turns out that the sort of information that's needed by APIs
can be answered solely by information_schema queries then it'd
be worth a look (though I suspect that some of the requirements
that the standards put on information_schema rule out some
performance improvements).
AFAIR, the only times we've heard from adapter authors were when they
couldn't make something work at all :-(. A review project like you
propose would be worthwhile. Aside from possibly helping the adapter
authors, it would give us a better sense of which changes to the
system
catalogs to avoid because they'd be likely to break clients.
Good enough reason for me to put some time into it, I think. I'll go see
what current APIs are using and put something up on the wiki.
Cheers,
Steve
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