Re: CREATE SYNONYM ...

On 3/7/06, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> To be blunt, those people aren't going to be moving to Postgres anyhow.
> If the notion of fixing this issue daunts them, they are not going to be
> willing to deal with the other incompatibilities between Oracle and PG.

IMHO, we're not discussing incompatibilities. We're discussing
functionality which PostgreSQL does not offer. The real question is should
PostgreSQL offer similar functionality?

And we are *not* buying into the notion of becoming a bug-compatible
> Oracle clone.

I don't think I said anything about that. Synonyms are not a bug, they are
a feature which offers functionality that PostgreSQL (in some cases)
cannot. I'm not saying we should clone synonyms just because Oracle has
them; instead, I think we could find a way to offer similar functionality
regardless of who/where the idea came from.

Like it or not, people use the proprietary functionality bigger vendors
offer; that's partly why the big vendors exist. When people move towards an
open source database they generally look at PostgreSQL first as we are known
for being the, "most advanced open source database" but in the same breath
we way things like "we're not going to copy Oracle/SQL Server/Sybase/DB2
features." You're right, we all agree that we shouldn't just add something
because [insert database vendor name here] has it, but we should at least
have an open mind and look at it from a functionality/migration perspective
before dismissing it.

--
Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect
EnterpriseDB Corporation
732.331.1324