Re: SQL-Invoked Procedures for 8.1

Gavin Sherry wrote:
> That's fairly bizarre (at least to my view of the world). Say we could
> have OUT parameters which were of some SETOF style type I think that would
> solve the same problem.

That won't satify people moving over from MSSQL/Sybase, but then again,
maybe the community at-large doesn't think it is important to satify
that group of users.

I think this part of the thread actually ties in with the discussion
regarding beginning/committing transactions within stored procedures.
Think of a stored procedure as a parameterized sql script that is run
from within a single statement, rather than as a series of statements
piped in from a file. In such a file, you might do

begin;
INSERT ...;
UPDATE ...;
commit;
SELECT ...;
CREATE TEMP TABLE foo AS SELECT ...
UPDATE ...;
SELECT ...;

in order to perform a series of actions while being able to see interim
results. In MSSQL, a stored procedure can be (and very often is) used to
do something exactly like the above (perhaps related to loading of a
data warehouse, or in an interface between two business systems). In
fact, T-SQL (the MSSQL/Sybase SQL variant) also supports simple
branching, variable assignment, and conditionals, which makes it
possible to do some fairly complex processing in stored procs. This is
the direction I always hoped Postgres would go with stored procedures.

Joe