Re: WITH clause in CREATE STATISTICS

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Hmm ... I'm not sure that I buy that particular argument. If you're
>> concerned that the grammar could not handle "FROM x JOIN y USING (z)",
>> wouldn't it also have a problem with "FROM x JOIN y ON (z)"?

> Tomas spent some time trying to shoehorn the whole join syntax into the
> FROM clause, but stopped once he realized that the joined_table
> production uses table_ref, which allow things like TABLESAMPLE, SRFs,
> LATERAL, etc which presumably we don't want to accept in CREATE STATS.
> I didn't look into it any further. But because of the other
> considerations, I did end up changing the ON to FOR.

Have you thought further about the upthread suggestion to just borrow
SELECT's syntax lock stock and barrel? That is, it'd look something
like

CREATE STATISTICS name [(list of stats types)] expression-list FROM ...
[ WHERE ... ] [ WITH (options) ]

This would certainly support any FROM stuff we might want later.
Yeah, you'd need to reject any features you weren't supporting at
execution, but doing that would allow issuing a friendlier message than
"syntax error" anyway.

If you don't have the cycles for that, I'd be willing to look into it.

regards, tom lane