Re: [GENERAL] SELECT Question

Tom Lane wrote:
> I was thinking of proposing that we provide something just about like
> that as a standard function (written in C, not in plpgsql, so that it
> would be available whether or not you'd installed plpgsql). There are
> some places in the information_schema that desperately need it ---
> right now, the value of FUNC_MAX_ARGS is effectively hard-wired into
> some of the information_schema views, which means they are broken if
> one changes that #define. We could fix this if we had a function like
> the above and exported FUNC_MAX_ARGS as a read-only GUC variable.
>

The attached patch introduces a C function as discussed above. Looks
like this:

regression=# select * from pg_generate(42,45);
pg_generate
-------------
42
43
44
45
(4 rows)

It also makes use of the function to replace the hard-wired parts of the
information_schema.

I have not yet made documentation changes, pending an answer to this and
other questions: what should this function be called? I'm at a loss as
to a good name -- the idea of the name pg_generate() was that the
function acts as a non-persistent sequence generator, but I don't really
like that name.

Any ideas, or other comments? For example, should pg_generate() allow a
finish value < start and therefore count backward? Should there be a
three argument version allowing a step size?

Thanks,

Joe