Re: magical eref alias names

On Thu, Nov 7, 2024 at 4:07 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Is there some strong reason to insist on making that core-dump-risking
> change, rather than simply assigning the now-one-size-fits-all alias
> when creating Alias nodes?

What I'm unhappy about is not being able to tell the difference
between a name that was invented by or at least meaningful to the user
and one that isn't. Filling in unnamed_subquery everywhere doesn't
accomplish that because the user could in theory supply that name;
even if that were no issue, I do not want to have code like:

if (strcmp(aliasname, "unnamed_subquery") == 0 || (strncmp(aliasname,
"unnamed_subquery_", strlen("unnamed_subquery_") && something
complicated with strtol to see if the rest of the name is an integer))
... looks system generated ...
else
... looks user generated ...

I would be more sympathetic to the idea of system-generated aliases if
they were generated in a way that made it likely that they would be
meaningful to the user. In fact, if they were generated in such a way
that they would be unique, that would actually be fantastic and I
would definitely not be arguing for removing them. But I think what we
have right now is a mess.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com