"""Provides an abstraction for obtaining database schema information.
-Development Notes:
+Usage Notes:
-I'm still trying to decide upon conventions for both the Inspector interface as well as the dialect interface the Inspector is to consume. Below are some of the current conventions.
- 1. Inspector methods should return lists of dicts in most cases for the
- following reasons:
- * They're both simple standard types.
+Here are some general conventions when accessing the low level inspector
+methods such as get_table_names, get_columns, etc.
+
+ 1. Inspector methods return lists of dicts in most cases for the following
+ reasons:
+ * They're both standard types that can be serialized.
* Using a dict instead of a tuple allows easy expansion of attributes.
* Using a list for the outer structure maintains order and is easy to work
with (e.g. list comprehension [d['name'] for d in cols]).
- * Being consistent is just good.
2. Records that contain a name, such as the column name in a column record
- should use the key 'name' in the dict. This allows the user to expect a
- 'name' key and to know what it will reference.
+ use the key 'name'. So for most return values, each record will have a
+ 'name' attribute..
"""