Re: Extensibility of the PostgreSQL wire protocol

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 2:04 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> That is a spot-on definition of where I do NOT want to end up. Hooks
> everywhere and enormous extensions that break anytime we change anything
> in the core. It's not really clear that anybody is going to find that
> more maintainable than a straight fork, except to the extent that it
> enables the erstwhile forkers to shove some of their work onto the PG
> community.
>

Given the work over the last few major releases to make several other
aspects of Postgres pluggable, how is implementing a pluggable protocol API
any different?

To me, this sounds more like a philosophical disagreement with how people
could potentially use Postgres than a technical one. My point is only that,
using current PG functionality, I could equally write a pluggable storage
interface for my Oracle and InnoDB data file readers/writers, which would
similarly allow for the creation of a Postgres franken-Oracle by extension
only.

I don't think anyone is asking for hooks for all the things I mentioned - a
pluggable transaction manager, for example, doesn't make much sense. But,
when it comes to having actually done this vs. posited about its
usefulness, I'd say it has some merit and doesn't really introduce that
much complexity or maintenance overhead to core - whether the extensions
still work properly is up to the extension authors... isn't that the whole
point of extensions?

--
Jonah H. Harris