Re: Pet Peeves?

On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 13:16 +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:
> So, what do people say? Is Postgres perfect in your world or does it
> do some
> things which rub you the wrong way?

For me:

Lack of column-level privileges. It just doesn't help scalability at
all. You end up having different tables each with different permissions,
or having to create a view with a ruleset attached, having to update the
view for each definition change in the view.

Lack of allowing subqueries in CHECK constraints and lack of allowing
references to other columns in DEFAULT clauses (like columns that
default to a calculated formula, but may be overridden if it violates a
constraint)

Now, last time I checked, Postgresql lacked an SQL extension to create
crosstab queries. Even though contrib have some helper functions, they
are not official and work only if the number of columns is actually
predefined. For instance if you want to create a query to produce
different paths to go through a graph, being represented by 1 arc per
record, you will never be able to predict the final number of columns
(path steps) needed for the crosstab without doing the whole query one
extra time to get the max(step).

Of course, there are things that PostgreSQL does great, like the
user-defined types.