Exposing the Field and table object ID's

[calledit]

Looking at:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/protocol-message-formats.html
Scrolling down to:
RowDescription (B)

One can see that postgres does submit the id of the column & table of each result field.

looking at the function parseMeta:
https://github.com/lib/pq/blob/master/conn.go#L1401
We ignore the 6 bytes that is the column & table id could we expose these Id's in the api somehow? Or would that be hinderd by go's sql package?

[msakrejda]

As far as I can tell, yes, that is among the many things that database/sql makes impossible (at least with any sensible API). Do you have any ideas on how we might expose this given the constraints of the interface?

[calledit]

It is't a pretty solution but..

Something like adding a field_oid_hack=true parameter to the sql.Open string argument.

db, err := sql.Open("postgres", "user=pqgotest dbname=pqgotest field_oid_hack=true")

The parameter would cause the Rows.Columns() function to instead of just returning a column name return a comma separated string with all the interesting values.

[msakrejda]

I think that could technically work but that's not what I would consider "a sensible API". Maybe a non-database/sql driver like pgx is a better fit for your use case? It seems to support this.

[calledit]

No, i agree.
Had not seen that one before, definitely.

[johto]

I wonder if we couldn't change database/sql to add a method to Rows() which would allows drivers to export an interface{} with additional information of their choosing. The patch should be relatively trivial, too.

[johto]

I commented on golang/go/#5606 suggesting roughly the above. The issue has been open for quite some time, though, so I'm not sure if anything will come of it.