Amit Kapila <amit.kapil...@gmail.com> writes: > On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Pavel Stehule <pavel.steh...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Now, PG has no any tool for checking dependency between functions and other >> objects.
> Isn't that already done for SQL function's (fmgr_sql_validator)? Pavel's point is that the only way to find out if the validator will fail is to run it and see if it fails; and even if it does, how much will you know about why? That's not particularly helpful for pg_dump, which needs to understand dependencies in a fairly deep fashion. It not only needs to figure out how to dump the database objects in a dependency-safe order, but what to do to break dependency loops. Right now I believe that pg_dump has a workable strategy for every possible case of circular dependencies, because they are all caused by secondary attributes of objects that can be split out and applied later, for example applying a column default via ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN SET DEFAULT rather than listing the default right in the CREATE TABLE command. However, if function A depends on B and also vice-versa (mutual recursion is not exactly an unheard-of technique), there is no way to load them both if the function bodies are both checked at creation time. I guess we could invent some equivalent of a forward declaration, but that still leaves us short of understanding what the function body is depending on. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers