8.1, OID's and plpgsql

Hi everyone,

in 8.1 by default tables have no OID's anymore. Since OID's are 4 byte it's
probably a good idea to discourage the use of them (they produced a lot of
trouble in the past anyways, particularly with backup/restores etc)

Now there's the issue with stored procs. A usual construct would be to
...
...
INSERT xxxxxx;
GET DIAGNOSTICS lastoid=RESULT_OID;
SELECT .... oid=lastoid;
....
....

Is there anything one could sanely replace this construct with?
I personally don't think that using the full primary key is really a good
option. Say you have a 3 column primary key - one being a "serial", the
others for example being timestamps, one of them generated with "default"
options. In order to retrieve the record I just inserted (where I don't know
the "serial" value or the timestamp) I'd have to

1) store the "nextval" of the sequence into a variable
2) generate the timestamp and store it to a variable
3) generate the full insert statement and retain the other values of the
primary key
4) issue a select to get the record.

Personally I think this adds unneccessary overhead. IMHO this diminishes the
use of defaults and sequences unless there is some easier way to retrieve the
last record. I must be missing something here - am I ?

UC