Re: Should we drop the "object" from ORDBMS?

On Thu, 2012-04-26 at 07:12 -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> We use dot syntax heavily, and I consider it a valuable feature. For
> example, names are stored in our database with separate columns for
> last name, first name, middle name, suffix (Jr., III, etc.), but we
> want to put those together in a canonical form for searching. Prior
> to PostgreSQL we have a trigger-maintained column in the database for
> this for each name. With PostgreSQL we were able to replace the
> column with a function without changing any of our application code
> or the queries they use.

Interesting hack; I hadn't thought of that.

I don't quite understand what you are advocating below:

> I would be very unhappy to see this feature deprecated or removed. I
> would much rather see functions which qualify as "generated columns"
> (i.e., they have as their only parameter the record type of a table)
> listed in the \d display for a table.

But if you are saying we should have explicit support for generated
columns, that sounds reasonable to me. That matches more closely what
you are trying to do, and keeps the namespace cleaner.

Another concept similar to generated columns is if we had simple-to-use
updatable views.

Regards,
Jeff Davis