Re: damage control mode

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>> As between the two, I get the feeling that there is more interest in
>> writeable CTEs.  But that impression might be wrong, since it's an
>> unscientific recollection of discussions on -hackers; which are
>> themselves not representative of anything.
>
> Writeable CTE is definitely the bigger feature.  Effectively, it allows
> people to do in a single query data-transformation operations which
> would have taken a stored procedure before.  Think of it as comparable
> to the introduction of callbacks in Perl for coolness.

Now if I knew what callbacks in Perl were, I'd probably be impressed.
You mean closures?

>> I have not looked at the window functions patch at all, and I haven't
>> looked at the latest version of writeable CTEs, either.  I will try to
>> spend some time on it in the next couple of days.  My feeling about
>> the last version is that it lacked a lot in the documentation
>> department, and also in the comments department.  Since I don't know
>> that code very well, that made it hard for me to assess technical
>> correctness.
>
> Hmmm, that's potentially lethal.  David Fetter has been doing a lot of
> presentations on the feature; surely he could turn them into some
> documentation?  David?

I would be 100% in favor of some more help on the documentation. I do
plan to reread this patch, but I don't know that I can cover the
amount of work that needs to be done myself, and as you say, lack of
adequate documentation could very well kill this patch. In fact, I'll
go so far as to say it's one of the most likely reasons why this patch
might not get in. So any resources we can bring to bear on that issue
would be well spent.

...Robert