Re: WIP Patch for GROUPING SETS phase 1

* Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> > I'm inclined to think that the audience for this is far larger than the
> > audience for the cube extension, which I have not once encountered in
> > the field.

+1

> Perhaps so. I would really prefer not to have to get into estimating
> how many people will be inconvenienced how badly. It's clear to me
> that not a lot of sweat has been put into seeing if we can avoid
> reserving the keyword, and I think we need to put in that effort.

I'm with Merlin on this one, it's going to end up happening and I don't
know that 9.5 is any worse than post-9.5 to make this change.

> We've jumped through some pretty high hoops to avoid reserving keywords in
> the past, so I don't think this patch should get a free pass on the issue.

This doesn't feel like an attempt to get a free pass on anything- it's
not being proposed as fully reserved and there is spec-defined syntax
which needs to be supported. If we can get away with keeping it
unreserved while not making it utterly confusing for users and
convoluting the code, great, but that doesn't seem likely to pan out.

> Especially considering that renaming the cube extension isn't exactly
> going to be zero work: there is no infrastructure for such a thing.
> A patch consisting merely of s/cube/foobar/g isn't going to cut it.

This is a much more interesting challenge to deal with, but perhaps we
could include a perl script or pg_upgrade snippet for users to run to
see if they have the extension installed and to do some magic before the
actual upgrade to handle the rename..?

Thanks,

Stephen