Re: wCTE: about the name of the feature

On 2011-02-24 6:20 PM +0200, 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.

Agreed.

> 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?

Out of everything suggested so far, I think this is the best we have, if
we can fit the whole thing into out error messages. Quickly grepping
through the patch suggests that we can, at least for the cases in the
current patch.

I also prefer "statement" over "command".

Regards,
Marko Tiikkaja