Re: [GENERAL] Re: [HACKERS] inheritance

If there was enuff interest (I'm not siding one way or the other) you could
add in a global setting to change the default.
I was also curious as to why these msgs are cross posted in 3 different
groups...
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Chris Bitmead <chris@tech.com.au>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org <pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org>;
pgsql-sql@postgreSQL.org <pgsql-sql@postgreSQL.org>;
pgsql-general@postgreSQL.org <pgsql-general@postgreSQL.org>
Date: Wednesday, July 21, 1999 10:14 AM
Subject: [GENERAL] Re: [HACKERS] inheritance


>Chris Bitmead <chris@tech.com.au> writes:
>> To me this is a much better idea. In any proper OO application you would
>> be using the "*" in postgres 99% of the time - that being the whole
>> point of OO. Does any consideration want to be given to making the same
>> change while there's not too many people using the inheritance feature?
>
>What makes you think there's "not too many people" using inheritance?
>Furthermore, if we did that it would break the code of people who
>*didn't* think they were using inheritance, except as a means of
>copying table definitions (which I do a lot, btw).
>
>I don't think we can reverse the default on that at this late date.
>
>> The other thing Informix does is automatically propagate all attributes
>> including indexes, constraints, pretty much everything to sub-classes.
>> Again.. I think this is the right thing. Any thoughts?
>
>I'd be inclined to agree on that, or at least say that we ought to
>provide a simple way of making it happen.  But the right semantics
>are not always obvious.  For example, if the ancestor has a SERIAL
>column, do the derived tables get their own sequence objects or
>share the ancestor's?  Does your answer change if the serial column
>was created "by hand" with a "DEFAULT nextval('some_sequence')" clause?
>I suspect that any way we jump on this sort of question will be wrong
>for some apps, so it should be possible to suppress system copying of
>attributes...
>
> regards, tom lane
>