Re: Supporting multiple column assignment in UPDATE (9.5 project)

On 5/2/14, 10:10 PM, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Meh. Then you could have a query that works fine until you add a column
>> to the table, and it stops working. If nobody ever used column names
>> identical to table names it'd be all right, but unfortunately people
>> seem to do that a lot...
>
> That's already the case with select statements

I don't think that's true if you table-qualify your column references
and don't use SELECT *.

> and, if a user were
> concerned about that, always have the option of aliasing the table as
> nearly 100% of professional developers do:
>
> SELECT f FROM foo f;
> etc.

So e.g.:

UPDATE foo f SET f = ..;

would resolve to the table, despite there being a column called "f"?
That would break backwards compatibility.

How about:

UPDATE foo SET ROW(foo) = (1,2,3);

ISTM that this could be parsed unambiguously, though it's perhaps a bit
ugly.

Regards,
Marko Tiikkaja