Re: trigger conversion advice needed

Thanks for the advice Tom. I figured out why my create trigger statement
wouldn't compile. Postgres expects a FOR EACH ROW or FOR EACH STATEMENT
clause before the EXECUTE portion. Oracle assumes a statement level trigger
unless you specify it to be for each row. In addition Oracle allows for
specific columns to be monitored for updates like I had in the Oracle
trigger (AFTER UPDATE OR INSERT OF order_date ON orders).

Well I ended up adding FOR EACH STATEMENT to the Postgres version after the
first email. I got a message back that said statement triggers weren't
implemented in Postgres yet even though according to the 7.3 docs it can be
used. I looked at the changelog for 7.4 and it said:
"Add statement-level triggers (Neil)

While this allows a trigger to fire at the end of a statement, it does not
allow the trigger to access all rows modified by the statement. This
capability is planned for a future release."

I wonder if that means that I can specify FOR EACH STATEMENT and have it
compile fine but it seems like that I can't acccess new and old though still
in 7.4. I'll have to experiment with what you suggested and perhaps look
into upgrading to 7.4 as well.
Thanks,
Clint

----Original Message Follows----
From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: cstotesbery(at)acm(dot)org
CC: pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [SQL] trigger conversion advice needed
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:40:08 -0500
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"Clint Stotesbery" <cstotes(at)hotmail(dot)com> writes:
> I'm working on converting a simple trigger from Oracle to Postgres and I
> have a couple ofl questions that I need some help on please. First here's
> the Oracle trigger:

> CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER t_ship_date
> AFTER UPDATE OR INSERT OF order_date ON orders
> BEGIN
> UPDATE orders
> SET ship_date = working_5days(order_date);
> END;

It looks to me like this trigger implicitly assumes that an UPDATE
command would only affect the row it was fired for --- which is not at
all how Postgres will interpret such a command.

(Alternatively, maybe the trigger actually does result in recomputing
every row's ship_date? You would only notice if ship_date had been
changed manually in some rows to be different from order_date + 5...)

Guessing at what is actually wanted here, my inclination would be to use
a BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE trigger and to detect updates by change from
OLD to NEW. The INSERT case would simply do

NEW.ship_date := working_5days(NEW.order_date);
RETURN NEW;

The UPDATE case would look like

IF NEW.order_date <> OLD.order_date THEN
NEW.ship_date := working_5days(NEW.order_date);
END IF;
RETURN NEW;

Pretty simple when you get the hang of it.

> CREATE TRIGGER t_ship_date AFTER UPDATE OR INSERT ON orders
> EXECUTE PROCEDURE t_ship_date();

> I always get a parse error at or near execute.

You need to say FOR EACH ROW in there too.

regards, tom lane

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