On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Marko Tiikkaja <ma...@joh.to> wrote: > On 9/3/14 4:46 PM, Robert Haas wrote: >> Making it >> suck more because you don't think it's as important as your feature >> is, in my opinion, not cool. > > I really can't see how that would make inheritance suck *more*. You can't > do UPDATE .. ORDER BY now, and you wouldn't be able to do it after the > patch. Yeah, sure, perhaps people using inheritance might feel left out, > but surely that would just motivate them to work on improving it.
I think it's entirely reasonable for us to require that all new SQL features should be required to work with or without inheritance. If we took the opposition position, and said that the only things that need to work with inheritance are the ones that existed at the time inheritance was introduced, then we'd not need to worry about it not only for this feature but for row-level security and SKIP LOCKED and GROUPING SETS and, going back a bit further, materialized views and security-barrier views and LATERAL and CTEs and on and on. Perhaps not all of those require any special handling for inheritance hierarchies, but some of them surely did, and if even 10% of the SQL features that we have added since table inheritance were allowed to opt out of supporting it, we'd have a broken and unusable feature today. Now some people might argue that we have that anyway, but the fact is that a lot of people are using inheritance today, even with all its flaws, and they wouldn't be if there were a long laundry list of limitations that didn't apply to regular tables. We should be looking to lift the limitations that currently exist, not add more. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers