Re: Wishlist: parameterizable types

From: Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Joey Adams <joeyadams3(dot)14159(at)gmail(dot)com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Wishlist: parameterizable types
Date: 2011-12-22 16:59:10
Message-ID: 4EF361DE.6040903@dunslane.net
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On 12/22/2011 11:34 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 1:04 AM, Joey Adams<joeyadams3(dot)14159(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> What I'm wondering is: how complex would it be to add such a feature
>> to PostgreSQL's type system?
> Very.
>
> It's been discussed before, although I can't tell you the subject
> lines of the threads off the top of my head. The basic problem is
> that there is a ton of code that assumes that a type is fully
> identified by an OID, and all of that code would need to be changed.

And frankly I'd expect there to be serious resistance to such a change.
It's not just a question of how hard it would be, but how advisable.

We have an extremely rich and uniquely extensible type system, and we've
added a number of somewhat generic features over the years. I'd need a
lot of convincing that we need fully generic types (and I came from the
Ada world many years ago which was the inspiration for many such features).

cheers

andrew

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