Re: [HACKERS] Performance testing of COPY (SELECT) TO

> Remember that we were talking about supporting views, not tables. And
> if a view uses a slow query then you are in immediate danger of having a
> slow COPY. This may not be a problem but it needs to be discussed and
> an agreement must be reached before introducing such a change (and not
> during feature freeze).
>
>
>

this will definitely be the case - however, this is not what it was made
for. it has not been made to be fast but it has been made to fulfill
some other task. the reason why this has been implemented is: consider a
large scale database containing hundreds of gigs of data. in our special
case we have to export in a flexible way. the data which has to be
exported comes from multiple tables (between 3 and 7 depending on the
data we are looking at in this project. the export has to be performed
in a flexible way and it needs certain parameters. defining tmp tables
and store the data in there is simply not "nice" at all. in most cases
exports want to transform data on the fly - speed is not as important as
flexibility here.

so in my view the speed argument does not matter. if somebody passes a
stupid query to copy he will get stupid runtimes - just like on ordinary
sql. however, we can use COPY's capabilities to format / escape data to
make exports more flexible. so basically it is a win.

best regards,

hans

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