On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 2011, at 9:36 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>>> This is at least a use-case for something^Wfeature like 'create
>>> synonym', allowing smooth end-user's application upgrade on schema
>>> update. I am not claiming that we need that, it just seems a good
>>> usecase for column alias/synonym.
>>
>> I had the same thought. I'm not sure that this particular example
>> would be worthwhile even if we had a column synonym facility. But at
>> least if we were bent on changing it we could do it without breaking
>> things.
>
> A synonym feature would definitely be useful for cases like this. We have a poorly named database at work; it's been
thatway for years and the only reason it's never been cleaned up is because it would require simultaneously changing
configsettings in dozens of places on hundreds of machines (many of which are user machines, which makes performing the
changevery difficult). As annoying as dealing with the oddball name is (there's a number of pieces of code that have to
specialcase it), it would be even more painful to fix the problem. If we had database name synonyms we could create a
synonymand migrate everything over time... and in the meantime, code could stop special-casing it.
That's probably the best explanation of why synonyms would be useful I
believe I've yet heard.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company