Hi, Functions that return SETOF RECORD need to be called with a column definition. That is a bit limiting. For example, you might not know how many columns your crosstab will have in advance, you might not know the structure of a table that you access with dblink in advance. Also, it's always a more complicated query to write, which is not very user friendly.
I searched a bit for the reason, and i found: "This allows the system to understand what * should expand to, and what proname in the WHERE clause refers to, in advance of trying to execute the function." in the dblink page. >From this sentence i can derive that there are some internal mechanisms that need to have the the column definition before the data. I was just wondering if there were a way to generate this information automatically, so that the user need not supply it. It would have a cost of course, but in some cases, it might certainly be worth it. Cheers, WBL -- "Quality comes from focus and clarity of purpose" -- Mark Shuttleworth
