Re: Another proposal for table synonyms

On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 12:13 -0800, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > Well, porting applications from other database systems that support synonyms
> > (i.e. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server).
>
> SQL Server supports synonyms? If it's not Oracle-only, it's a more
> powerful argument to have the feature.

Oracle, DB2 and MSSQL support Synonyms.

> I'd love to hear from someone at EDB: how are you dealing with synonym
> name collisions right now?

I think the way we deal with that is the way PostgreSQL deals with it.
Unique names per search path.

> > Is this the feature the community would benefit from? We can consider adding
> > column synonyms if we won't hardwire synonyms to pg_class objects.

Column synonyms don't exist as far as I can tell (at least in Oracle)[1]

>
> So, I don't support your idea of having a completely separate catalog.
> Sorry.

Yeah we have been talking about this internally and it seems (at least
to me) that the 85% solution in pg_class that supports
tables/views/sequences is best.

I posted to the Oracle list asking how many of them use Synonyms and
they are definitely a used feature.

JD

1. http://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/Synonyms

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