On 6/7/21 6:10 PM, Tom Lane wrote: > "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johns...@gmail.com> writes: >> On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 1:54 PM Mark Zellers <mark.zell...@workday.com> >> wrote: >>> What if you could use the MINUS keyword in the column >>> list of a select statement to remove a column from the result set returned >>> to the client? >> I asked this a decade ago and got no useful responses. >> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/02e901cc2bb4%2476bc2090%24643461b0%24%40yahoo.com#3784fab26b0f946b3239266e3b70a6ce > I can recall more-recent requests for that too, though I'm too lazy > to go search the archives right now. > > I'm fairly disinclined to do anything about it though, because I'm > afraid of the SQL committee standardizing some other syntax for the > same idea in future (or maybe worse, commandeering the same keyword > for some other feature). It doesn't seem quite valuable enough to > take those risks for. > > Note that it's not like SQL hasn't heard of projections before. > You can always do "SELECT a, b, d FROM subquery-yielding-a-b-c-d". > So the proposed syntax would save a small amount of typing, but > it's not adding any real new functionality. > >
True, but the problem happens when you have 250 fields and you want to skip 4 of them. Getting that right can be a pain. I agree that inventing syntax for this has the dangers you identify. cheers andrew -- Andrew Dunstan EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
