Re: damage control mode

2010/2/7 Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com>:
>> As between the two, I get the feeling that there is more interest in
>> writeable CTEs.  But that impression might be wrong, since it's an
>> unscientific recollection of discussions on -hackers; which are
>> themselves not representative of anything.
>
> Writeable CTE is definitely the bigger feature.  Effectively, it allows
> people to do in a single query data-transformation operations which
> would have taken a stored procedure before.  Think of it as comparable
> to the introduction of callbacks in Perl for coolness.

Yes, it's bigger. It's certainly a bigger marketing checkbox item.
That doesn't necessarily make it more useful.

As a comparison point, I've come across a number of cases with clients
where being able to do RANGE BETWEEN on windowing queries would've
been extremely helpful, and where there's no reasonable way to do that
at all today other than to dump all the data off into the application.
Neither of which are exactly pretty or fast.

The similar case for Writable CTEs, I've always been able to wrap it
in a function. Which is nowhere near as nice as having writable CTEs
of course, but the workaround for not having it is less severe.

I certainly wish we could have both, of course... :S

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/