Re: Deprecating RULES

Daniel,

> Unfortunately I myself see little evidence of the vast, vast --
> several nines of vast -- majority of folks using rules, and as I said:
> as a thought experiment, merely one solved bug is worth more to me
> than rules from what I know at this time.

Again, the answer to this is to run an aggressively promoted survey, so
that we can have data, rather than speculation by -hackers.

> Finally, putting aside the use cases you are able to positively
> identify from your personal experirence, I think it's reasonable to
> put in a message of intent-to-deprecate and reverse or revise course
> as more data appears. Perhaps the thinking should be: "intent to
> aggressively gather data to enable deprecation" rather than "a final
> deprecation decision and plan, full stop."

Exactly.

I fact, I'll go further and say that I believe we will be deprecating
RULEs eventually. It's merely a question of how long that will take and
what we need to document, announce and implement before then.

I would tend to say "well, they're not hurting anyone, why not keep
them?" Except that we're gathering an increasing number of features
(RETURNING, FDWs, CTEs, Command triggers) which don't work well together
with RULEs. That puts us in danger of turning into MySQL ("Sorry, you
can't use Full Text Search with transactions"), which is not a direction
we want to go in.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com