On 06/21/2015 11:12 AM, Fabien COELHO wrote:

Hello Josh,

Add backslash continuations to pgbench custom scripts.
[...]
IMHO this approach is the best compromise.

I don't personally agree.  I believe that it it worth breaking backwards
compatibility to support line breaks in pgbench statements, and that if
we're not going to do that, supporting \ continuations is of little value.

As someone who actively uses pgbench to write custom benchmarks, I need
to write queries which I can test.  \ continuation does NOT work on the
psql command line, so that's useless for testing my queries; I still
have to reformat and troubleshoot.  If we added \ continuation, I
wouldn't use it.

I think we should support line breaks, and require semicolons for
end-of-statement.  Backwards-compatability in custom pgbench scripts is
not critical; pgbench scripts are neither used in produciton, nor used
in automated systems much that I know of.

I'm not clear on why we'd need a full SQL lexer.

Attached is a "without lexer" version which does ;-terminated SQL commands
and \-continuated meta commands (may be useful for \shell and long \set
expressions).

As Tom pointed out, you need the full lexer to do this correctly. You can argue that something that handles the most common cases is enough, but realistically, by the time you've handled all the common cases correctly, you've just re-invented the lexer.

The home-grown lexer is missing e.g. dollar-quoting support, so this is not be parsed correctly:

do $$
begin
  ...
end;
$$;

That would be very nice to handle correctly, I've used DO-blocks in pgbench scripts many times, and it's a pain to have to write them in a single line.

Also worth noting that you can currently test so-called multi-statements with pgbench, by putting multiple statements on a single line. Your patch seems to still do that, but if we went with a full-blown SQL lexer, they would probably be split into two statements.

I think we should either bite the bullet and include the full SQL lexer in pgbench, or come up with some new syntax for marking the beginning and end of a statement. We could do something like bash here-documents or Postgres dollar-quoting, for example:

\set ...
select 1234; -- A statement on a single line, no change here

-- Begin a multi-line statement
\multi-line-statement END_TOKEN
select *
  from complicated;
END_TOKEN

- Heikki



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