Re: Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Dave Page" <dpage(at)vale-housing(dot)co(dot)uk> writes:
> > Well, what would constitute a complete spec? I think I've told the group
> > what I would like to be able to do, what unanswered questions can I
> > (hopefully :-) ) answer?
>
> I'm still unclear on exactly what your needs are. In the first place,
> are you expecting to obtain data from arbitrary SELECT statements, or
> only from statements of the form "SELECT * FROM single_table"? You've
> also been confusing as to whether you want transparency of views (ie,
> does a select from a view return data about the view's nominal columns
> or about the underlying base table columns?). What about cases
> involving aggregates or grouping --- there may be simple Vars in the
> target list, but they can hardly be thought to represent updatable values.

These questions can't possibly be unique to PG -- other database
vendors must have answered these questions for their implementations
of ODBC/JDBC too, or their databases would give ODBC and JDBC client
authors the same kinds of trouble.

So ... how have these questions been answered by other database
vendors?

The spec may be underspecified on these points, but since the entire
purpose of ODBC and JDBC is to provide a database-independent
framework for application authors to use, it follows that
compatibility with other implementations is highly desirable. So
doing more or less what other database vendors have done in response
to these underspecified issues is probably a sensible course of action
when there's no other obviously better answer.

--
Kevin Brown kevin(at)sysexperts(dot)com