There was a thread in January of 2012 where we discussed the idea of pulling system table/column name descriptions from the SGML docs and creating SQL comments for them:
Well, I'd expect some of those columns to get (at least over time) significantly more detailed information than they have now. Certainly more than you'd put in comments in the catalogs. And having some sort of combination there seems to overcomplicate things...
I think the idea of having the short descriptions in SQL and longer ones in SGML is not maintainable. One idea would be to clip the SQL description to be no longer than a specified number of characters, with proper word break detection.
Here is how psql displays column and table comments:
test=> create table test(x int); CREATE TABLE test=> comment on column test.x IS 'wow'; COMMENT test=> \d+ test Table "public.test" Column | Type | Modifiers | Storage | Stats target | Description --------+---------+-----------+---------+--------------+------------- x | integer | | plain | | wow Has OIDs: no
test=> comment on table test is 'yikes'; COMMENT test=> \d+ List of relations Schema | Name | Type | Owner | Size | Description --------+------+-------+----------+---------+------------- public | test | table | postgres | 0 bytes | yikes (1 row)
Should I continue working on this patch?
Hi all,
If it can help, Euler wrote about that some time ago in your blog [1].
