On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 3:02 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 7:52 AM, Fabien COELHO <coe...@cri.ensmp.fr> wrote: >>> If someone thinks that "gset" is a good idea for pgbench, which I don't, it >>> could be implemented. I think that an "into" feature, like PL/pgSQL & ECPG, >>> makes more sense for scripting. > >> I agree: I like \into. > >> But: > >>> SELECT 1, 2 \; SELECT 3; >>> \into one two three > >> I think that's pretty weird. > > Yeah, that's seriously nasty action-at-a-distance in my view. I'd be okay > with > > SELECT 1, 2 \into one two > SELECT 3 \into three > > but I do not think that a metacommand on a following line should > retroactively affect the execution of a prior command, much less commands > before the last one. Even if this happens to be easy to do in pgbench's > existing over-contorted logic, it's tremendously confusing to the user; > and it might be much less easy if we try to refactor that logic. > > And I'm with Pavel on this: it should work exactly like \gset. Inventing > \into to do almost the same thing in a randomly different way exhibits a > bad case of NIH syndrome. Sure, you can argue about how it's not quite > the same use-case and so you could micro-optimize by doing it differently, > but that's ignoring the cognitive load on users who have to remember two > different commands. Claiming that plpgsql's SELECT INTO is a closer > analogy than psql's \gset is quite bogus, too: the environment is > different (client side vs server side, declared vs undeclared target > variables), and the syntax is different (backslash or not, commas or not, > just for starters). I note also that we were talking a couple months ago > about trying to align psql and pgbench backslash commands more closely. > This would not be a good step in that direction.
True, but I'd still argue that \into is a lot more readable than \gset. Maybe both programs should support both commands. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
