Re: Re: proposal and patch : support INSERT INTO...RETURNING with partitioned table using rule

John Lumby <johnlumby(at)hotmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Fri, 22 Jun 2012 09:55:13, Robert Haas wrote:
>> I do notice that the RETURNING clause of the INSERT can't reference
>> NEW, which seems like a restriction that we probably ought to lift,
>> but it doesn't seem to have much to do with your patch.

> The main use of my proposal is to be able to return the value of the
> sequence assigned to the NEW.id column, so yes that is a serious
> restriction.

I think both of you are confused. What the RETURNING clause can see is
the inserted row's actual values. You can certainly get the assigned
sequence ID out of that. I would argue that being able to see the NEW.*
expressions is at best secondary, because that data doesn't necessarily
have anything to do with what went into the table (consider the
possibility that a BEFORE trigger changed it).

> However, even if that restriction is lifted, it will not help with the
> case where the rule is an invocation of a function, which is the case
> I need.

What you're requesting seems pretty much nonsensical to me. The point
of being able to write a RETURNING clause in a rule is to emulate what
would happen with RETURNING on a regular table. As an example, suppose
that I have

create table t (id serial, data1 text, data2 text);

and for whatever reason I write

insert into t(data1, data2) values('foo', 'bar') returning id, data2;

I should get back the generated sequence value and the data2 value, but
*not* the data1 value. Anything else is just wrong. Now, if t has a
rule "ON INSERT DO INSTEAD SELECT somefunction()", how is that going to
happen? The function doesn't know what the RETURNING clause looks like.
If we had a notional inserted-row-value then the executor could do the
RETURNING computation based on that, but there's no way to make a
connection between whatever the function does internally and the data
for RETURNING to chew on.

The whole concept of ON INSERT DO [INSTEAD/ALSO] SELECT seems pretty
shaky to me, as it *necessarily* involves a command substitution that
causes an INSERT to act in a strange fashion that the client application
will need special code to cope with. I won't argue to take the feature
out, because people do use it in custom applications --- but it doesn't
play nice with RETURNING, and I don't think it can be made to. It's
pretty much a legacy method of doing business IMO.

It seems to me that instead of lobbying to throw another kluge on top
of that pile, you'd be better off looking for alternative solutions.
Have you tried implementing this as an INSTEAD OF trigger, and not using
rules at all? That mechanism works just fine with RETURNING, and it
seems to me that it would let you do whatever you could do inside a
custom function. It would certainly be enough for the
dynamic-partition-redirection problem.

regards, tom lane