FW: Views, views, views! (long)

my bad [thanks Greg]

Peter, Merlin, Andrew,

And the restriction to current user owned objects reduces

usability

to

zero.

The information schema restricts the views to the objects to which

you

have
some access right, which doesn't seem all that useless.

There's a difference between restricting it to objects on which you

have

rights (which our views do as well) vs. restricting it to objects you
*own*,
which is what the information_schema does, according to Andrew. Yes?

Good point, although I'll take either over the current behavior.
Basically, I feel very strongly that *all* interface to database
metadata should be through views unless you happen to database root. I
have personal reasons for this but I also think it's the correct
philosophy in general, even if the views are the incredibly simple:

create view pg_class_view as select * from pg_class;

As a side note I also like the idea of set returning functions because
of the extra flexibility of security invoker/definer...but I'll be a
huge cheerleader for any effort that gets user applications off of
dependency on internal system tables.

In a previous similar discussion Simon noted that the Terradata database
had different view configurations for different security requirements.

my 0.02$ (and that's about all it's worth :-) )

Merlin