On Monday, March 20, 2017 3:30:49 PM EDT Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 4:12 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
wrote:
> > createdb, dropdb - also not clear they're about postgres, more likely to
> > be
> > used by mistake but not that bad. That said, do they add any *value*
> > beyond
> > what you can do with psql -c "CREATE DATABASE"? I don't really see one, so
> > I'd suggest dropping these too.
>
> That would annoy me, because I use these constantly. I also think
> that they solve a problem for users, which is this:
>
> [rhaas ~]$ psql
> psql: FATAL: database "rhaas" does not exist
> [rhaas ~]$ psql -c 'create database rhaas;'
> psql: FATAL: database "rhaas" does not exist
> [rhaas ~]$ gosh, i know i need to connect to a database in order to
> create the database to which psql tries to connect by default, so
> there must be an existing database with some name, but what exactly is
> that name, anyway?
> -bash: gosh,: command not found
>
> There was an occasion when this exact problem almost caused me to give
> up on using PostgreSQL. Everybody here presumably knows that
> template1 and postgres are the magic words you can add to the end of
> that command line to make it work, but that is NOT self-evident to
> newcomers.
Same here. I worked on a system with a shrink-wrap installer which installed
pgsql as well and initialized it for use by the system user of our software.
If a tester or sales engineer wanted to play with the DB, it would be about 30
minutes before they would end up at my desk, in tears.
