On 12/02/2022 20:50, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
On 2022-02-12 01:18:04 +0100, Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum wrote:
On 10/02/2022 18:22, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
On 2022-02-09 21:14:39 -0800, Guyren Howe wrote:
Examples of small things Postgres could have:
• SELECT * - b.a_id from a natural join b
My use case for such a feature are tables which contain one column (or a
small number of columns) which you usually don't want to select: A bytea
column or a very wide text column. In a program I don't mind (in fact I
prefer) listing all the columns explicitely, but exploring a database
interactively with psql typing lots of column names is tedious
(especially since autocomplete doesn't work here).
Maybe for this specific use case it's easier to teach psql how to do that,
instead of trying to amend the SQL implementation? Example:
SELECT * \- col1 \- col2 FROM table
psql looks up the columns, translates * into the actual list minus these two
columns and lets you continue entering the query.
I think the easiest way to get the columns would be to EXPLAIN(verbose)
the query. Otherwise psql (or whatever your shell is) would have to
completely parse the SQL statement to find the columns.
(On a tangent, I'm wondering if this could work for autocomplete. The
problem with autocomplete is of course that you probably don't have
a syntactically correct query at the time you need it. So the editor
would have to patch that up before sending it to the database.)
I was thinking about this problem for a while, and it's not easy to solve.
Hence I came up with the idea that psql could - once the table is known
and very specific psql syntax is there (\- as example) replace the * with
the actual columns. All of this before the query is run, and as a user you
can edit the column list further.
The main concern listed further upstream is "surfing the database", in
interactive mode. Not the first time I hear this problem.
Solving this specific case might reduce the need for a SQL extenson.
Note: the attempt above is just an idea, not an actual proposal how to
implement this.
Regards,
--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group
European PostgreSQL User Group - Board of Directors
Volunteer Regional Contact, Germany - PostgreSQL Project
