On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 10:15:03AM -0500, Pollard, Mike wrote: > Tom Lane wrote: > > What's been suggested in the past is some sort of standalone > > file-format-conversion utility, which could deal with this sort of > > stuff without having to also deal with all the backend-internal > > considerations that COPY must handle. So (at least in theory) it'd > > be simpler and more maintainable. That still seems like a good > > idea to me --- in fact, given my druthers I would rather have seen > > CSV support done in such an external program. > > Why not add hooks into COPY to call the user's massage functions? That > way you don't have to read and write the data, then read it again to > load it into the database.
Well, it does make you wonder about supporting something like (perl style): \copy foo FROM 'myfilter dodgy-data.csv |' or maybe \copy foo from pipe 'myfilter dodgy-data.csv' or possibly \pipe foo from dodgy-data.csv using autodetecting-format-filter.pl Which would cause psql to fork/exec the filter and pass the output data to the server. We could then provide all sorts of parsers for format-of-the-week. This would probably include the converse: \pipe foo to table.xls using make-excel-spreadsheet.pl Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a > tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone > else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.
pgpwxn3pkXZyG.pgp
Description: PGP signature
