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From: Laurenz Albe <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: 7.2.1. The FROM Clause
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:09:34 +0200
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>

On Fri, 2026-06-12 at 09:58 +0000, PG Doc comments form wrote:
> I have a question regarding:
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-table-expressions.html#QUERIES-FROM
> Is the following sentence from the docu correct?
> "Instead of writing ONLY before the table name, you can write * after the
> table name to explicitly specify that descendant tables are included."
> 
> I read it like you can use "* after the table name" instead of "ONLY before
> the table name" which seems wrong.

The "instead" does not mean that "tab *" is a substitute for "ONLY tab",
but is meant to mean that you cannot use both at the same time, like "ONLY tab *".

But I understand your confusion.  To be honest, I only learned about the syntax
"tab *" a few days ago.  Digging through the history, this syntax has been
obsolete since 2000.  I think we could remove both the paragraph that confuses
you and the asterisk from the syntax diagram.  We can leave the obsolete
syntax to accomodate SQL code that hasn't changed for over 25 years, but I don't
see a reason to keep it in the documentation.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

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