On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Andrew Dunstan <and...@dunslane.net> wrote: > And many places regard "select *" in anything other than throw-away queries > as bad practice anyway. I have seen people get bitten by it over and over > again, and I have worked at companies where it is explicitly forbidden in > coding standards.
In terms of application queries I generally agree. However, I think this rule does not apply to server side definitions, especially in regards to views and/or composite types. There are cases where you _want_ the view to be define as 'all fields of x'...In fact, it's pretty typical IMNSHO. It may be possible to expose this behavior. I'd like to see: select * from foo -- and -- select (foo).* exhibit different behaviors -- ().* is more a type operator, returning all the fields of foo, than a field list expression. This gives us a cool loophole to exploit for views that really want to be defined with *: create view particular_foos as select (foo).* from foo where something = true; create view something_complex as select (foo).*, (func(foo.field)).*; -- execute func() just one time please! The something_complex case above is a real problem in how it behaves currently -- sometimes without a hassle free workaround. Am I off my rocker? :-) I've made this point many times (prob got annoying a long time ago) but I'm curious if you guys agree... merlin -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
