On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:26:13AM -0500, Markova, Nina wrote: > > I am in process of learning psql. I'm trying to extract information > > about tables - as many details as possible. Something similar to what > > I'm used to see using Ingres RDBMS Postgres and Ingres are different database engines, so the output from the various utilities will be different. > > table structure, Not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean the columns, their data types and associated constraints then \d should be what you want. > > creation date, PG doesn't record this anywhere. > > number of rows, You have to explicitly get this by doing: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table; The reason is that it's an expensive operation (in terms of disk IOs) because a whole table scan has to be performed. I'd guess Ingress has this information to hand at the cost of worse performance in the presence of multiple writers. If you want a lower cost solution for PG you can look in the statistics for your tables; but this will be somewhat out of date. Something like this works for me: SELECT n_live_tup FROM pg_stat_user_tables WHERE relid = 'mytable'::REGCLASS; > > primary keys, again, \d is what you want > > is it journalled, Not sure what you mean here; but everything in PG is written to the WAL. You can't control this. -- Sam http://samason.me.uk/ -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general