This Postgres extension implements the "describe a result set" functionality, which, given a query or another PostgreSQL command that returns a result set, shows a list of columns in that result set, along with their respective data types and, possibly, other attributes.

Prerequisites

Install the postrgresql-server and postgresql-debug packages.

Make sure that the directory of Postgres binaries is in $PATH.

Building the extension

Run make.

Installing the extension

Assuming the current user has sufficient privileges to copy files into the Postgres SHAREDIR and LIBDIR, run make install.

Otherwise use sudo make PG_CONFIG=BINDIR/pg_config install.

You can then connect to the database and create the extension:

CREATE EXTENSION describe_resultset;

Usage

After installing the extension, call the describe_resultset function:

SELECT * FROM describe_resultset('select 1 as foo, 1.1 as bar')

which will produce the following output:

 column_name | column_type | column_type_name | column_len | column_attrs
-------------+-------------+------------------+------------+--------------
 foo         |          23 | int4             |          4 |
 bar         |        1700 | numeric          |         -1 |
(2 rows)