Re: CREATE SYNONYM ...

On 3/7/06, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > (Actually, I don't think the case for table synonyms has been made
> > adequately either; "Oracle has it" is *not* enough reason to take on
> > another feature that we'll have to maintain forever, especially given
> > that we're being told that one of the major use-cases for synonyms
> > isn't going to be supported. AFAICS this patch does nothing you
> > couldn't do much better with a quick search-and-replace over your
> > application code. In short, I remain unsold.)
>
> What I don't really understand is what part of this cannot be achieved
> by changing the search_path. The only case I can think of is when you
> have tables A and B in schemas R and S, but you want to use R.A and S.B.
> So there's no way to change search_path for this. But is this really
> the intended use case?

Not totally intended, but (unfortunately) used nonetheless.

I wonder whether synonyms were introduced in Oracle because of that idea
> of theirs that each user has its own schema, and can access that schema
> only; so to use a table in another schema you need to create a synonym.
> We don't have that limitation so we don't need that usage either.

No, one could do fully qualified naming in Oracle; synonyms do have other
purposes outside of this single one listed.

--
Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect
EnterpriseDB Corporation
732.331.1324