That's fairly bizarre (at least to my view of the world). Say we could have OUT parameters which were of some SETOF style type I think that would solve the same problem.
That won't satify people moving over from MSSQL/Sybase, but then again, maybe the community at-large doesn't think it is important to satify that group of users.
I think this part of the thread actually ties in with the discussion regarding beginning/committing transactions within stored procedures. Think of a stored procedure as a parameterized sql script that is run from within a single statement, rather than as a series of statements piped in from a file. In such a file, you might do
begin; INSERT ...; UPDATE ...; commit; SELECT ...; CREATE TEMP TABLE foo AS SELECT ... UPDATE ...; SELECT ...;
in order to perform a series of actions while being able to see interim results. In MSSQL, a stored procedure can be (and very often is) used to do something exactly like the above (perhaps related to loading of a data warehouse, or in an interface between two business systems). In fact, T-SQL (the MSSQL/Sybase SQL variant) also supports simple branching, variable assignment, and conditionals, which makes it possible to do some fairly complex processing in stored procs. This is the direction I always hoped Postgres would go with stored procedures.
Joe
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