Re: Updatable views

Bernd Helmle <mailings(at)oopsware(dot)de> writes:
> [ latest views patch ]

This is the first time I've actually looked at this patch, and I am
dismayed. viewUpdate.c looks like nothing so much as a large program
with a small program struggling to get out. What is all the stuff about
handling multiple base rels? SQL92, at least, does not say that a join
is updatable, and AFAICT this patch is rejecting that too ... though
it's hard to tell with the conditions for allowing the join to be
updatable scattered through a lot of different functions. And some of
the code seems to be expecting multiple implicit rules and other parts
not. I get the impression that a lot of this code is left over from a
more ambitious first draft and ought to be removed in the name of
readability/maintainability.

I'm unclear as to why you've got DO INSTEAD NOTHING rules in there ---
the spec says that a WITH CHECK OPTION violation results in an error,
not in nothing happening, so it doesn't seem to me that we should need
any NOTHING rules to implement the spec. It would probably help if
there were some header documentation that explained exactly how the
module intends to transform a SELECT to create the various action rules.

The pg_dump changes seem pretty odd too. Why wouldn't you just
ignore implicit rules during a dump, expecting the system to
regenerate them when the view is reloaded?

regards, tom lane