Re: Rules: A Modest Proposal

On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 08:54:56PM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> David E. Wheeler wrote:
> > On Oct 4, 2009, at 1:57 PM, David Fetter wrote:
> >
> > >It's less about like or dislike and more about facing up to the
> > >reality that we've got a major legacy foot-gun left over from the
> > >experimentation of the Berkeley days.
> >
> > I think you're going to need to be a bit more concrete than that. In
> > what way is it a foot-gun? What examples can you provide? What,
> > exactly, are the issues?
>
> While I don't agree with David Fetter's premise, I think rehashing how
> we handle VIEWs would be a good step towards updatable views. Right
> now, the implementation of that is stalled precisely because of the rule
> system.
>

I am not sure where that view implemenation is, but I doubt its stalled because
of the rule system. You can definitely create updatable views using rules.
However, I'm not sure updatable views are a good thing in most scenarios. I see
way too much damage as a likely outcome.

Rules are one of the great generative features of postgres and I see no reason
to cut them. Features should not be limited just because they can be used
incorrectly, since they can also be used in other correct/interesting ways we
have yet to think up.

--
--Dan