Re: 16 parameter limit

"Josh Berkus" <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> Personally, as a heavy user of PL/pgSQL procedures, I'm not sure you
> need to increase the *default* number of parameters. Postgres just
> needs to implement a parameter number change as part of a documented
> command-line compile-time option, i.e. "--with-parameters=32".

I would not object to providing such a configure option; it seems a
reasonable thing to do. But the real debate here seems to be what
the default should be. The ACS people would like their code to run
on a "stock" Postgres installation, so they've been lobbying to change
the default, not just to make it fractionally easier to build a
non-default configuration.

> Also, what is the practical maximum number of parameters?

If you tried to make it more than perhaps 500, you'd start to see
index-tuple-too-big failures in the pg_proc indexes. Realistically,
though, I can't see people calling procedures with hundreds of
positionally-specified parameters --- such code would be unmanageably
error-prone.

I was surprised that people were dissatisfied with 16 (it was 8 not very
long ago...). Needing more strikes me as a symptom of either bad coding
practices or missing features of other sorts.

regards, tom lane