Re: A Modest Upgrade Proposal

On 17/07/16 20:08, Jim Nasby wrote:
> On 7/13/16 2:06 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> On 07/07/2016 01:01 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>>
>>> There was an unconference session on this topic at PGCon and quite a
>>> number of people there stated that they found DDL to be an ease-of-use
>>> feature and wanted to have it.
>>
>> Yeah, I haven't meet anyone yet that would like to have:
>>
>> select replicate_these_relations('['public']);
>>
>> vs:
>>
>> ALTER SCHEMA public ENABLE REPLICATION;
>>
>> (or something like that).
>
> I generally agree, but I think the more important question is "Why?". Is
> it becouse DDL looks more like a sentence? Is it because arrays are a
> PITA? Is it too hard to call functions?

For me it's many small reasons. I want to store it in catalogs and some
things there are nicer when you manipulate using standard DDL processing
(like dependencies for example). The syntax is also bit nicer. Our
documentation works better for DDLs than functions (that's something we
should fix but I am not doing it as part of this patch). Same goes for
psql tab completion. We automatically gain things like event triggers.
The support in pg_dump is also more straightforward with DDL.

It might make sense to have functions for manipulating slots and origins
as those are just primitives which user should not have to fiddle with
but for things that are directly meant for user interaction DDL just
feels better.

--
Petr Jelinek http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services