Re: Views, views, views: Summary of Arguments - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

I'm not thinking exclusively in terms of whether they would be useful
to me, personally. In fact, I'm certain that they would be useful to
me, personally.

What I question is whether they need to be a part of the internal
development of PostgreSQL. To me, CPAN is an integral part of being
able to do Perl development effectively.

Whether or not a VPAN setup could come to seem as natural and easy
for new users to use, I don't know. Regardless, these new views are
going to need to be documented similarly so that new users are aware
of them.

And it still isn't clear (to me) how the debate over how to shape
them as included by default will resolve, so punting to an externally
maintained repository is just a suggestion as an alternative.

I think it's important to consider the perspective of both developers
and users, and the internal views clearly creates issues for the
developers.

-tfo

--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC

Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™

http://www.sitening.com/
110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6
Nashville, TN 37203-6320
615-260-0005

On May 11, 2005, at 11:35 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:

> Thomas, All,
>
>
>> I guess I'm having difficulty understanding why the system catalogs
>> themselves and provision of support for information_schema are not
>> sufficient for what exists in core.
>>
>
> Because you can't answer the question: "What tables does user phil
> have update
> permissions on?" or "How many overloaded versions of function
> df_new_company() do I have?", and similar, without doing advanced
> queries on
> the system tables.   Queries which are prone to mistakes: earlier
> on this
> thread a *pgsql hacker* posted a sample system catalog query which
> contained
> a mistake.  Asking our general users to navigate the complexity of
> the system
> catalogs is just not good application practice.
>
> I don't really think a "VPAN" is any kind of solution for this
> purpose (though
> I'd like it for other things).   The purpose of these views is to make
> PostgreSQL more user-friendly, and telling people: "Oh just go to
> http://name/of/obscure/site, lookup these 10 views, log in as
> superuser and
> load them and you're golden" is not much of an improvement in
> user-friendliness.
>
> To reiterate my point previously:  these system views are NOT aimed
> at the
> people on *this* list; they are for the people on the -NOVICE and -
> GENERAL
> lists and IRC and the people who don't yet use PostgreSQL.  Please
> stop
> thinking exclusively in terms of whether they would be useful to you,
> personally.
>
> --
> Josh Berkus
> Aglio Database Solutions
> San Francisco
>
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