Getting a useful list of tables

Question

Can anyone recommend a query to get a useful list of tables for the end user? Our application allows users to browse the database and look at data in tables. Currently, we first have the user choose a schema, and then a table,view or synonym within the schema.
I just learned about the public owner though and it has 1000s of things in it's space, most of which aren't useful to the user.
Originally, i was using the OCI schema apis, but we switched to using a simple select from all_objects. To simplify things somewhat i automatically filter things with a '$' in them. In the public schema there are also lots of things with a '/' in them. filtering on that brings the total down to 2000+ objects, but that still seems like a lot.
I'd really like to separate 'system' objects from 'application' objects and only show the latter. Are there any idioms people use for this? Is there some information somewhere that I'm missing that might have this?
thanks,
:)ross

Answer 1

I eventually settled on the following
SELECT OBJECT_NAME
FROM ALL_OBJECTS
WHERE OWNER='%s' AND
OBJECT_TYPE IN ('TABLE','VIEW','SYNONYM') AND
OBJECT_NAME NOT LIKE '%$%' AND
OBJECT_NAME NOT LIKE '%/%'
ORDER BY OBJECT_NAME
where the particular schema i'm interested in is plugged in for %s.
but when the schema is 'PUBLIC' I add the following to the WHERE clause
NOT EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM ALL_SYNONYMS
WHERE OWNER=ALL_OBJECTS.OWNER AND
SYNONYM_NAME=OBJECT_NAME AND
TABLE_OWNER IN ('CTXSYS','DMSYS','EXFSYS','MDSYS','OLAPSYS','ORDSYS','SYS','WKSYS','WMSYS','XDB','SYSTEM','SYSMAN')) AND
to filter out all the system synonyms
:)ross