Re: COPY (query) TO file

In article <44804377(dot)8070706(at)dunslane(dot)net>,
Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:

> Mark Woodward wrote:
>> Tom had posted a question about file compression with copy. I thought
>> about it, and I want to through this out and see if anyone things it is a
>> good idea.
>>
>> Currently, the COPY command only copies a table, what if it could operate
>> with a query, as:
>>
>> COPY (select * from mytable where foo='bar') as BAR TO stdout
>>
>>

> Isn't this already being worked on? The TODO list says:

> Allow COPY to output from views

IIRC Karel Zak posted a patch for that.

> Another idea would be to allow actual SELECT statements in a COPY.

> Personally I strongly favor the second option as being more flexible
> than the first.

How so? I see that

psql -h somehost somedb -c "copy 'somequery' to stdout" >localfile

would be more terse than

psql -h somehost somedb -c "create temp view tmp as somequery; copy tmp to stdout" >localfile

but what's more flexible there?