Re: Views, views, views! (long)

Andreas,

> As Dave already pointed out, serious admin tools will avoid views. We
> have to deal with version specific issues anyway.

Actually, I don't think that's what Dave said.  He simply said that modifying 
pgAdmin to keep up with pg_catalog changes hasn't actually been a problem.

And, as an increasing number of 3rd-party tools support PostgreSQL (like 
Embarcadero) they need a simple comprehensible API for system objects -- more 
objects than are included in the information_schema.  I'm currently working 
on the integration of a major DSS tool with PostgreSQL, and we're already 
using the alpha version of the system views because we need them.   A 3rd 
party proprietary vendor is not going to learn about OIDs, and they're not 
going to use pgAdmin.

When we discussed this on this list 2 months ago, I was under the impression 
that extending the information_schema was verboten becuase it would break the 
SQL spec.  If that's not the case, I personally would love to not duplicate 
objects.   But let's establish that.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco