Re: Suggestions for the best strategy to emulate returning multiple sets of results

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Seref Arikan
<serefarikan(at)kurumsalteknoloji(dot)com> wrote:
> Greetings,
> I have a binary blog which is passed to a plpython function by a plpgsql
> function. plpython is used to create 2 different transformations of this
> binary blob to sets of postgresql type instances.
> The flow is: blob -> plpython -> canonical python based data model -> (set
> of db_type_As + set of db_type_Bs)
> The problem is, transforming the binary blob to postgresql is expensive, and
> a single binary blob is the source of two transformations. I have not found
> a way of returning to sets of data form the plpython function.
> At the moment, I have two options:
> 1) calling two functions in plpython that use the same blob and return
> different sets of postgresql types (heavyweight transformation will happen
> twice: bad)
> 2) creating two temp tables and calling the plpython function which in turn
> writes to these temp tables, and then using the temp tables from plpgsql.
>
> Do you think there are any other options that I might be missing? What would
> be the most efficient way of passing temp tables to plpython function?

Are the two sets the same size? If so, you probably want to do a
vanilla SRF. If not, consider a a composite containing arrays:

create type foo as(a int[], b int[]);

CREATE FUNCTION get_stuff()
RETURNS foo
AS $$
return [(1, 2, 3, 4, 5), (1,2,3)];
$$ LANGUAGE plpythonu;

select * from get_stuff();
postgres=# select * from get_stuff();
a | b
-------------+---------
{1,2,3,4,5} | {1,2,3}

merlin