Re: Retail DDL

I have been thinking of this from a little different direction. We
already have all the needed functionality in pg_dump so why not just
have an option to do

CREATE EXTENSION pg_dump;

Which would wrap and expose whatever the current version of pg_dump is doing.

It still would need to resolve the difficult question of naming
things, but otherways it looks like just a certain amount of
mechanical work.

We could even have just one set of functions with a few possible argument types

pg_dump(object oid, options text);
pg_dump(object text, options text);

---
Hannu

On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 10:35 AM Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)kurilemu(dot)de> wrote:
>
> On 2025-Jul-24, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> > Obviously we already have some functions for things like views and
> > triggers, but most notably we don't have one for tables, something users
> > have long complained about. I have been trying to think of a reasonable
> > interface for a single function, where we would pass in, say, a catalog oid
> > plus an object oid, and maybe some optional extra arguments.
>
> Reproducing a table might need multiple commands. Do you intend to
> return a single string containing multiple semicolon-separated commands,
> or are you thinking in a RETURNS SETOF where each row contains a single
> command?
>
> What about schema-qualification needed for elements in the commands? We
> have the option to schema-qualify everything, _or_ to depend on whether
> the schemas are in search_path, _or_ to schema-qualify nothing (which
> gives the user the chance to recreate in any schema by changing
> search_path).
>
>
> > That seems a bit fragile, though. The alternative is that we have a
> > separate function for each object type, e.g. pg_get_{objecttype}_ddl.
> > I'm kinda leaning that way, but I'd like some sort of consensus before
> > any work gets done.
>
> It looks like the discussion is leaning this way too. I think it's
> a reasonable choice.
>
> --
> Álvaro Herrera Breisgau, Deutschland — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
>
>