On 04/02/2010 04:16 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Generally speaking I'm against exposing that data structure to clients, because there will inevitably be griping when we change it (as we most certainly will). Your complaints boil down to "this is hard to parse from the client side", and that already tells me you're doing something that we will refuse to support.
Sorry, I got the impression that the node format was intended to be stable. If it's for internal use only then I don't suppose my suggestions make much sense.
As for the structure of the parse nodes themselves, changes aren't a big deal to me. What I'm doing is diffing entire files of DDL, so even if the node format changes over time the changes in two files parsed using the same code are still evident. In fact, the ambiguities in parsing don't really affect this use case much because I don't need exact values to detect changes.
Markus' link suggests using the parser for a load balancer, which would require that this all be in library form anyway as the balancer cannot afford a round trip to the server to parse the query, so maybe I should focus my efforts there. Making it a separate library would also resolve the compatibility issues as the library could keep its own structures regardless of where Postgres goes.
Thanks for the input! -- m. tharp -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
