ROW_NUMBER alias

Hi,

I needed ROW_NUMBER() in PostGresql and I did find the 'temporary sequence'
method as a workaround and i think it at least gets the job done relatively
well, ... so no problems there.

Its just that from a usability point of view, isn't it better that we
provide some kind of an aliasing mechanism here that allows a new user to
(unknowingly but) implicitly use a temporary sequence rather than make him
use SubQuery with a COUNT(*) and a comparison operator (with disastrous
performance) instead ??

So for a new user :

A query such as this :

SELECT ROW_NUMBER() AS row_number , a, b, c
FROM table
WHERE table_id = 973
ORDER BY record_date;

is internally interpreted by the planner as :

CREATE TEMP SEQUENCE rownum;

SELECT nextval('rownum') AS row_number , t.a, t.b, t.c
FROM (
SELECT a, b, c
FROM table
WHERE table_id = 973
ORDER BY record_date
) t;

DROP SEQUENCE rownum;

Any ideas ?
(Of what I remember, I think till recently PostgreSql internally replaced
'MAX(x)' queries with a 'ORDER BY x DESC LIMIT 1' implicitly)

--
Robins