are views obsolete ?

Dear all

given the power of SETOF/ROWTYPE functions etc are select-only
views becoming obsolete/redundant ? IOW, do views only make
sense any longer when I add delete/insert/update rules to them
because the "select aggregation" advantage can be achieved
with SRFs, too (and more powerful at that) ? And even then
INSERTs could be replaced by standard functions, too (as could
updates/deletes but that would be ugly because one would have
to group where-condition values with update-attribute values,
at least for the UPDATE case).

I have not found a thread discussing the *relative advantages*
of views vs. SRFs in the archives... I am sure it's quite
clear to the more involved people. The only advantage of SRFs
over views that I can see is that in an SRF I have the power
of procedural languages immediately available while in a view
definition I would have to call individual functions to
dynamically computer column values.

Pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Karsten
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