Thomas, All, > I guess I'm having difficulty understanding why the system catalogs > themselves and provision of support for information_schema are not > sufficient for what exists in core.
Because you can't answer the question: "What tables does user phil have update permissions on?" or "How many overloaded versions of function df_new_company() do I have?", and similar, without doing advanced queries on the system tables. Queries which are prone to mistakes: earlier on this thread a *pgsql hacker* posted a sample system catalog query which contained a mistake. Asking our general users to navigate the complexity of the system catalogs is just not good application practice. I don't really think a "VPAN" is any kind of solution for this purpose (though I'd like it for other things). The purpose of these views is to make PostgreSQL more user-friendly, and telling people: "Oh just go to http://name/of/obscure/site, lookup these 10 views, log in as superuser and load them and you're golden" is not much of an improvement in user-friendliness. To reiterate my point previously: these system views are NOT aimed at the people on *this* list; they are for the people on the -NOVICE and -GENERAL lists and IRC and the people who don't yet use PostgreSQL. Please stop thinking exclusively in terms of whether they would be useful to you, personally. -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
