Re: How do I use the backend APIs

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, "Chad" <chadzakary(at)hotmail(dot)com> wrote:
> In a word: The kind of problems people use Berkeley DB for.

> People use BDB for more fine grained cursor access to BTrees. Stuff you
> CANNOT do with SQL. There is a market for this. See their website. I'd
> like something similar from Postgres so that the data would be stored
> in a full fledged RDBMS but I could use the cursor methods for
> searching more efficient than SQL. Best of both worlds.

I daresay we get enough challenges to fill the day when we use the
"coarse graining" of SQL.

I'm generally keener on getting aggregate results that let me not
bother needing to search in fantastical ways...

As far as I'm concerned, you're not pointing at a better world; you're
pointing at a worse one. I've seen far too many bugs falling out of
the navigational complexities of navigation-oriented data structures.

The sheer scope of bugginess of that is why my ears perk up when
mention of languages like R and APL and such come up; I don't want to
navigate through data; I want to parallel process it :-).

> I've had a quick browse around the Postgres code and found some
> functions like "_bt_first()" but no sample code to use it. BTW its
> for developing an alternative server based access to the underlying
> relational data.

Those sorts of functions are intended as internals, and public usage
can be expected to break gloriously badly as changing them is fair
game as PostgreSQL progresses to new versions.

For things for "public use," you should look at what is offered in
libpq.

If you could outline some usage that might make it more powerful, it
is not implausible that people would listen. There are doubtless ways
that cursors could be enhanced, and that might be the direction you
would want to go. But you're not too likely to see PostgreSQL
rewritten for the sake of attracting the "market" of people who need
to manipulate the fine semantics of B-tree navigation.
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