On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Mark Nelson wrote: > Hi, > > I can't seem to find how to do this anywhere. I'm trying to query > the db and have it return the name of each of the tables in the > db. Something like \dt does in psql, but from PHP. Any ideas? Well, the quick and dirty trick is to run psql with the -E switch which will rEveal the sql psql is using to do it's dirty work. In this case, 7.2 and 7.3 are pretty similar. For postgresql 7.2 it's: SELECT c.relname as "Name", CASE c.relkind WHEN 'r' THEN 'table' WHEN 'v' THEN 'view' WHEN 'i' THEN 'index' WHEN 'S' THEN 'sequence' WHEN 's' THEN 'special' END as "Type", u.usename as "Owner" FROM pg_class c LEFT JOIN pg_user u ON c.relowner = u.usesysid WHERE c.relkind IN ('r','v','S','') AND c.relname !~ '^pg_' ORDER BY 1; For 7.3 it's: SELECT n.nspname as "Schema", c.relname as "Name", CASE c.relkind WHEN 'r' THEN 'table' WHEN 'v' THEN 'view' WHEN 'i' THEN 'index' WHEN 'S' THEN 'sequence' WHEN 's' THEN 'special' END as "Type", u.usename as "Owner" FROM pg_catalog.pg_class c LEFT JOIN pg_catalog.pg_user u ON u.usesysid = c.relowner LEFT JOIN pg_catalog.pg_namespace n ON n.oid = c.relnamespace WHERE c.relkind IN ('r','v','S','') AND n.nspname NOT IN ('pg_catalog', 'pg_toast') AND pg_catalog.pg_table_is_visible(c.oid) ORDER BY 1,2; note that you can probably trim a fair bit off of these queries to get just the table names.