Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:01:24 -0400
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
To: Steve Estes <denzera@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Summary of DDL/DML statement return/output values?
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On 2020-Jun-23, Steve Estes wrote:

> Thanks Alvaro.  Looks cool.  So, on the one hand it'd be nice to be able to
> auto-generate this once all the commands are standardized into one
> structure.  That'd be slick.

I thought they were already standardized ... But anyway, I was thinking
that this would generate *one* table listing all commands with their
tags.  I was not thinking in putting the tag in each command's page:
I'm not sure that that would be generatable.

> On the other hand, the number of commands in SQL is not that large a
> universe, such that it'd be at least somewhat practical to just add Output
> as a standard section of the doc page for any command.  They number 182 in
> both v11, v12 and v13 thus far, and many of those are variations of ALTER,
> CREATE or DROP (127 of them, in fact), such that they probably mostly share
> an output format.  More importantly, the output of each command is unlikely
> to change much going forward, certainly not within a major release
> (right?).  So we could just document each command's output, and if need be
> then pull that information into a summary page thereafter, or when the
> commit you mention is finished.

I can't say I'm terribly excited about this idea.  I won't stop you if
you want to pursue it, but I'm not sure I see the value in a RETURN
VALUE section that says that the command returns the command name.
Maybe it would make sense to have that for the exceptional cases only?

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services