Jagged Rows (was Re: Proposal: real procedures again (8.4))

On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 03:24:20PM +0100, Zeugswetter Andreas ADI SD wrote:
> > > I think the cool thing that Josh Berkus wants is
> > >
> > > return query select a, b, c from foo;
> > > return query select d, e, f from bar;
> > >
> >
> > maybe better
> >
> > SELECT a,b FROM foo;
> > SELECT d, e FROM bar;
> >
> > procedure doesn't need return statement usually
>
> The background for Quel was, that when selecting all fields from an
> inheritance hierarchy you got the additional fields of each child.
>
> Thus the field count and types could vary within one cursor.
> Like if you would allow the following:
> select a, b::int from foo
> union all
> select a, c::varchar, d, e from bar

This is called jagged rows, which were in Illustra, Informix, and
possibly some others. It would be nice to have protocol-level support
for them, but it's a pretty large feature because the current Postgres
code starts off with the assumption that you know at run time the
shape of all the rows and that that shape is uniform.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
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