Re: SELECT * in a view

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Andreas Kretschmer
<akretschmer(at)spamfence(dot)net> wrote:
> Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
>> > That's not what I want.  That means that if old_view changes, new_view
>> > will not reflect the changes.  Is there any way to get new_view to
>> > automatically include all fields from old_view, no matter how many or
>> > how few fields there are?
>>
>> No.  This behavior is specifically required by the SQL standard: the
>> result rowtype of a view is determined when the view is created, and
>> is not supposed to change when underlying tables have columns added.
>> That's why we expand * when the view is created.
>
> Right, and additional, don't use select *, in particular production
> code.

I don't agree. This entirely depends on context. It is completely
reasonable to want to be able expand a composite type without
explicitly listing the fields, or do other things:

select foo.* from foo join bar on ... -- what's wrong with this?
select (v).* from (select aggfunc(foo) as v from foo where ...) -- or this?

merlin