On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 08:26:33PM +0200, Tomas Vondra wrote: > > While parsing the output of psql is cumbersome, accessing the > > system tables seems more likely to break whenever a new version > > of PostgreSQL comes out. > > Really? Those catalogs are pretty stable, and when changed they're > usually extended (new columns are added). So well written queries won't > break very often. Actually I'd expect the psql output to change much > more often. The whole point of the information_schema is that it's well-defined by the standard. The system tables themselves do sometimes change between versions -- that's why you get warnings from psql when you start up a client with a different major version number than the server. (If you want to see this in action, try using a 7.4-era client with 9.0, and do some tab completion or something like that.) A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general