Re: Support for %TYPE in CREATE FUNCTION

Jan Wieck <JanWieck(at)Yahoo(dot)com> writes:

> What I (wanted to have) said is that the "one-time porting"
> can be solved by external preprocessing/translation of %TYPE
> into the resolved type at porting time. That is *porting*
> instead of making the target system emulate the original
> platform. You know, today you can run a mainframe application
> on an Intel architecture by running IBM's OS390 emulator
> under Linux - but is that porting?

Ah. My personal interest is not in doing a straight port from Oracle
to Postgres and never going back. I'm sure there are people
interested in that. Personally, I'm interested in supporting people
who want to use either Oracle or Postgres, or both, with the same
application.

> And I repeat what I've allways said over the past years. I
> don't feel the need for all the catalog mucking with most of
> the ALTER commands. Changing column types here and there,
> dropping and renaming columns and tables somewhere else and
> kicking the entire schema while holding data around during
> application coding doesn't have anything to do with
> development or software engineering. It's pure script-kiddy
> hacking or even worse quality. There seems to be no business
> process description, no data model or any other "plan", just
> this "let's code around until something seems to work all of
> the sudden". Where's the problem description, application
> spec, all the stuff the DB schema resulted from? Oh - it
> resulted from "I need another column because I have this
> unexpected value I need to keep - and if there'll be more of
> them I can ALTER it to be an array". Well, if that's what
> people consider "development", all they really need is
>
> ALTER n% OF SCHEMA AT RANDOM;

It is desirable to have some reasonable mechanism for changing the
schema without requiring data to be dumped and reloaded. Otherwise it
is very difficult to upgrade a system which needs to be up 24/7, such
as many web sites today.

It is not acceptable for eBay to shut down their system for even just
a few hours for maintenance. Shouldn't it be possible for eBay to run
on top of Postgres?

Ian