Re: schema support, was Package support for Postgres

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Tom Lane wrote:

> Bill Studenmund <wrstuden(at)netbsd(dot)org> writes:
> > For the most part, I think packages and schemas are orthogonal. I'm taking
> > a cue from Oracle here. Oracle considers packages to be a schema-specific
> > object.
>
> Nonetheless, it's not clear to me that we need two independent concepts.
> Given a name search path that can go through multiple schemas, it seems
> to me that you could get all the benefits of a package from a schema.
>
> I'm not necessarily averse to accepting Oracle's syntax for declaring
> packages --- if we can make it easier for Oracle users to port to Postgres,
> that's great. But I'm uncomfortable with the notion of implementing two
> separate mechanisms that seem to do the exact same thing, ie, control
> name visibility.

I'm at a loss as to what to say. I think that what packages do and what
schemas do are different - they are different kinds of namespaces. That's
why they should have different mechanisms. Packages are for making it
easier to write stored procedures for large programming projects or for
code reuse. Schemas, well, I need to learn more. But they strike me more
as a tool to partition entire chunks of a database.

Also, packages have a whole concept of initialization routines and global
variables, which strike me as having no place alongside tables and views.

Take care,

Bill