Re: LATERAL

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> Fair enough. I think I started to drift off in the direction of
> making that argument, but it wasn't really my point.

To be honest, I'm not sure I agree with Tom here on the value of
requiring a keyword to tell the system that you really mean what you
wrote. On the other hand, it sounds like the spec is pretty clear on
this, and I don't feel we should violate it just because we think it's
being silly on this point.

> The original
> point I was trying to make is that we may not need to invent any kind
> of new name-resolution or scoping in order to make LATERAL() work.
> Instead, LATERAL() can just do everything normally with the exception
> of not throwing the following errors when they would otherwise be
> thrown:

I don't know for sure, but I do hope you're right. I'd certainly love
to be able to do this in general.. There's a number of cases where I've
had to do the hokey-pokey to get around our lack of ability to do this
when using set-returning functions.

> I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but if I am, it seems likely to
> be a pretty straightforward change.

Please continue to explore it and propose a patch. :)

Thanks,

Stephen