Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql
Date
Msg-id 19203.1263933875@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql  (Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>)
Responses Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql  (Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>)
Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql  (David Christensen <david@endpoint.com>)
Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql  (Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>)
Re: MySQL-ism help patch for psql  (Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc>)
List pgsql-hackers
Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> writes:
> That being said, I don't have much of an opinion, so if you see a
> problem, then we can forget it. After all, we would need some kind of a
> prefix anyway to avoid conflicting with actual SQL... maybe "\m"? And
> that defeats a lot of the purpose.

Yeah, requiring a prefix would make it completely pointless I think.
The submitted patch tries to avoid that by only matching syntax that's
invalid in Postgres, but that certainly limits how far we can go with
it.  (And like you, I'm a bit worried about the LOAD case.)

The last go-round on this was just a couple months ago:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2009-11/msg00241.php
although I guess that was aimed at a slightly different idea,
namely making "show databases" etc actually *work*.  This one at
least has a level of complication that's more in keeping with the
possible gain.

The previous discussion started from the idea that only DESCRIBE,
SHOW DATABASES/TABLES, and USE were worth worrying about.  If we
were to agree that we'd go that far and no farther, the potential
conflict with SQL syntax would be pretty limited.  I have little
enough experience with mysql to not want to opine too much on how
useful that would be, but it does seem like those are commands
I use right away anytime I am using mysql.
        regards, tom lane


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