Craig Ringer <cr...@2ndquadrant.com> writes: > What you appear to want is to access arbitrary fields of a record by name.
> The reason this isn't supported directly in PL/PgSQL is, AFAIK, mainly > an issue of data typing. Each field in a record may be of a different > type. So the return type would change based on the field accessed at > execution time, which isn't something PL/PgSQL or regular SQL likes very > much, as plans are formed and cached in part based on the types involved. Right. For better or worse, SQL is a strongly-typed language. PG's emphasis on datatype extensibility makes this constraint even tighter, since you can't even tell e.g. which operators or functions would be valid to apply to a field of indeterminate type. > We could and probably should provide an operator or function to access > records of a field in their text form by name. Patches are welcome ;-) As was noted upthread, if you're satisfied with pretending all fields of a record are text, it's not clear why you wouldn't be happy using hstore instead. Or JSON, which at least has heard of numbers as well as text. I think the current push to improve json/jsonb is driven largely by the desire to handle scenarios of this sort. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers