Re: Oracle Style packages on postgres

From: Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, rmm(at)sqlisor(dot)com, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Oracle Style packages on postgres
Date: 2005-05-10 01:28:07
Message-ID: 200505100128.j4A1S7a00751@candle.pha.pa.us
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Josh Berkus wrote:
> Tom,
>
> > This is exactly the sort of argumentation that got the last proposal
> > shot down ;-). I see no reason that you can't do the namespacing and
> > security as well or better using the existing (and more standard) schema
> > feature. If there's something there that's not covered, what is it?
>
> a) When you have 1000's of procedures, it becomes very useful to have more
> than one level of namespacing. This is not an exaggeration; one project I
> looked at who decided not to convert from Oracle to PostgreSQL had over
> 100,000 procedures and functions. Lack of packages was their main reason
> for not switching. Schemas provide only *one* level of namespacing, unless
> we want to "improve" on the SQL standard and allow nested schemas.
>
> b) Schemas do not provide us with any way of limiting the scope of functions
> and persistent variables. With packages, you would want:
> 1. functions which can only be called internally to the package
> 2. variables which are only visible inside the package
> 3. functions which can only be called as part of the package (thus utilizing
> the initialization and internal variables) and not on their own.

What if we defined functions to look in their own schemas for functions
they call, then use the search_path, rather than using the search path
first?

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Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
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