On 10/17/2012 07:25 PM, Tom Lane wrote:


I'm fairly annoyed by the entire tenor of this conversation, because
the people who are hollering the loudest seem to be people who have
never actually touched any of the rules code, but nonetheless seem
prepared to tell those of us who have what to spend our time on.

+1

I too have been quite annoyed.


Now having said that, I would definitely like to see rules in their
current form go away eventually.  But not without a substitute.
Triggers are not a complete replacement, and no amount of wishful
thinking makes them so.

Perhaps it would be more profitable to try to identify the pain points
that make people so eager to get rid of rules, and then see if we could
alleviate them.  One big problem I know about offhand is the
multiple-evaluation risk, which seems at least in principle fixable.
What others are there?

                        


Yeah. That's by far the best approach. It has the merit of being positive rather than just taking something away that people do use, even if it's only a relatively small number of users.

The biggest pain people have mentioned is that they don't work with COPY. I am in fact about to start working on a project which will probably alleviate that pain point. I'm not going to say much more, and I would not have said anything right now except that there is this sudden rush to deprecate rules, or announce a future removal of the feature. However, I hope to have a proposal to put to the community by about the end of November.

On that point, it's also worth noting that FDWs provide a nice workaround, instead of doing a straight

    COPY TO mytable FROM myfile

you set up the source as a foreign table using file_fdw or my file_text_array_fdw, and then do

    INSERT INTO mytable
    SELECT ...
    FROM my_foreign_table;

Maybe this too would be worth mentioning in the docs, maybe in the rules section with an xref from the copy section.

So, please, hold off for little bit. I don't mind putting warnings in the docs, but I'd really rather we waited on any announcement of a future possible deprecation, or log warnings that using rules will cause zombies to eat your brainz.

cheers

andrew


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