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Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:27:02 -0400
Subject: Re: table listing queries
From: Sean Davis <sdavis2@mail.nih.gov>
To: Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@digital-scurf.org>,
 <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
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On 8/25/05 7:13 AM, "Daniel Silverstone" <dsilvers@digital-scurf.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I know that questions like this have been asked in the past, but I can
> find no definitive answer to one particular part of my problem...
> 
> Namely, in MySQL I can say: "SHOW TABLES FROM 'dbname'" to list tables
> in a database I'm not currently connected to.
> 
> I can find no way of doing this in PgSQL.
> 
> Is there a way, or is postgres not letting me list the tables until I
> have connected to the database for security reasons?

There are system catalogs which contain the information about tables.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/catalogs.html

However, they are specific to each database.  In other words, the storage of
database-specific information is all WITHIN the given database, so you need
to be physically accessing the given database to even see those tables (or
do the query).  

Sean