Re: WITH clause in CREATE STATISTICS

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> Yawn. So, we have not achieved the stated goal which was to get rid of
> the ugly clause in the middle of the command; moreover we have gained
> *yet another* clause in the middle of the command. Is this really an
> improvement? We're trading this
> CREATE STATISTICS s1 WITH (dependencies, ndistinct, options) ON (a, b) FROM t1 WHERE partial-stuff;
> for this:
> CREATE STATISTICS s1 USING (dependencies, ndistinct) WITH (options) ON (a, b) FROM t1 WHERE partial-stuff;

> Can we decide by a show of hands, please, whether we're really on board
> with this change?

That seems totally messy :-(

I can't see any good reason why "WITH (options)" can't be at the end of
the query. WITH is a fully reserved word, there is not going to be any
danger of a parse problem from having it follow the FROM or WHERE clauses.
And the end is where we have other instances of "WITH (options)".

It also seems like we don't need to have *both* fully-reserved keywords
introducing each clause *and* parentheses around the lists. Maybe
dropping the parens around the stats-types list and the column-names
list would help to declutter? (But I'd keep parens around the WITH
options, for consistency with other statements.)

One other point is that as long as we've got reserved keywords introducing
each clause, there isn't actually an implementation reason why we couldn't
accept the clauses in any order. Not sure I want to document it that way,
but it might not be a bad thing if the grammar was forgiving about whether
you write the USING or ON part first ...

regards, tom lane