On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 3:18 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> I think the fact that single-target INTO lists and multiple-target >> INTO lists are handled completely differently is extremely poor >> language design. It would have been far better, as you suggested >> downthread, to have added some syntax up front to let people select >> the behavior that they want, but I think there's little hope of >> changing this now without creating even more pain. > > How so? The proposal I gave is fully backwards-compatible. It's > likely not the way we'd do it in a green field, but we don't have > a green field. > >> I have a really hard time, however, imagining that anyone writes >> SELECT a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k INTO x, y, z and wants some of >> a-k to go into x, some more to go into y, and some more to go into z >> (and heaven help you if you drop a column from x or y -- now the whole >> semantics of the query change, yikes). What's reasonable is to write >> SELECT a, b, c INTO x, y, z and have those correspond 1:1. > > That's certainly a case that we ought to support somehow. The problem is > staying reasonably consistent with the two-decades-old precedent of the > existing behavior for one target variable.
My point is that you objected to Pavel's proposal saying "it's not clear whether users want A or B". But I think they always want A. -- 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
