System Tables

Started by Steve Jacksonabout 23 years ago5 messages
#1Steve Jackson
asdasdfwea@asweweasdv.net

Hi

Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
tables I may find what informations? I try to code a generic procedure
which gets information (like field type, field length, foreign keys...)
about tables and fields from a system table.

Thank you for your help in advance

sj

#2Lee Kindness
lkindness@csl.co.uk
In reply to: Steve Jackson (#1)

See:

http://www.us.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.2/postgres/catalogs.html

for PostgreSQL 7.2.x, for 7.3 see:

http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/catalogs.html

Lee.

Steve Jackson writes:

Show quoted text

Hi

Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
tables I may find what informations? I try to code a generic procedure
which gets information (like field type, field length, foreign keys...)
about tables and fields from a system table.

Thank you for your help in advance

#3Neil Conway
neilc@samurai.com
In reply to: Steve Jackson (#1)
Re: System Tables

On Thu, 2002-11-28 at 02:32, Steve Jackson wrote:

Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
tables I may find what informations?

The PostgreSQL Developer's Guide has some information:

http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/catalogs.html

But IIRC it might be a little out of date. Also, starting psql with "-E"
and taking a look at the queries it uses to generate data is often
useful.

Cheers,

Neil

--
Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> || PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC

#4Andrew J. Kopciuch
akopciuch@bddf.ca
In reply to: Steve Jackson (#1)
Re: System Tables

On Thursday 28 November 2002 00:32, Steve Jackson wrote:

Hi

Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
tables I may find what informations? I try to code a generic procedure
which gets information (like field type, field length, foreign keys...)
about tables and fields from a system table.

Read the man page for psql.
Check out the section for PSQL META_COMMANDS.

Sounds like everything you need is in there.

Andy

#5Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Neil Conway (#3)
Re: System Tables

Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> writes:

Has anyone of you a good pointer to a description of where in the system
tables I may find what informations?

The PostgreSQL Developer's Guide has some information:
http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/catalogs.html

But IIRC it might be a little out of date.

One would hope not. It's taken us awhile to finish the work of
documenting every system catalog, but as of 7.3 they are all in there.
I intend to crack the whip as much as necessary to ensure that these
docs get updated whenever someone changes the catalogs ;-)

Actually, pointing people to the developer docs is more likely to create
the reverse problem: what they read there may be too new for the release
they are actually using.

regards, tom lane