Re: Speeding up the Postgres lexer

Tom Lane wrote:

>[snip - flex is slowed down by backtracking - how to fix ]
>
>What I'm wondering is whether this is really worth doing or not.
>There are currently just two parts of the lexer rules that are affected
>--- the {real} rule illustrated above, and the rules that allow quoted
>strings to be split across lines as the SQL spec requires. But the
>patches are still pretty ugly, and what's really annoying is that there
>doesn't seem to be any way to get flex to complain if someone later
>makes a change that breaks the no-backup-cases property again.
>
>
>

I would be more concerned if there were not reasonable alternatives to
many bulk parsed inserts (COPY, prepared statement).

But I do think it's worth it, even so ... not all client interfaces
support prepared statements (notoriously PHP, although I understand KL
has sent patches to fix that) and not all inserts are suitable for COPY.

cheers

andrew