Re: wCTE: about the name of the feature

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:20:48AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> The wCTE patch refers to the feature it's adding as "DML WITH". I'm
> still pretty unhappy with that terminology. In my view of the world,
> "DML" includes SELECT as well as INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE. The wikipedia
> entry about the term
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Manipulation_Language
> agrees that that's at least the majority usage, and even our own docs
> seem to use it to include SELECT as often as not. Since the distinction
> is absolutely critical to talking about this feature sensibly, I don't
> think it's a good plan to use an acronym that is guaranteed to produce
> uncertainty in the reader's mind.
>
> The best idea I have at the moment is to spell out "data modifying
> command" (or "statement") rather than relying on the acronym.
> In the code, we could change hasDmlWith to hasModifyingWith, for
> example. The error messages could read like
> data-modifying statement in WITH is not allowed in a view
>
> Comments?

+1

If we ever decide add in what I'd originally envisioned, namely DCL
and DDL, the name continues to describe what's going on :)

Cheers,
David.
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