Re: PL/pgSQL 2

Álvaro Hernández Tortosa wrote
> On 01/09/14 21:52, Joel Jacobson wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 8:34 PM, Álvaro Hernández Tortosa <

> aht@

> > wrote:
>>>      What I can add is that, if Postgres is to devote resources to a new
>>> language, I would plan it with a broader scope. What would attract most
>>> users? Would it bring non postgres users to Postgres? What could be one
>>> of
>>> the killer features of any next version? My trivial answer to most of
>>> these
>>> questions is: PL/SQL. I don't know with detail how complex this is to
>>> get in
>>> Postgres (well, EDB probably knows), but if I had to chose a new
>>> language,
>>> this is it. So my questions would rather be:
>> Interesting visionary ideas.
>>
>> For me personally, I have no Oracle functions to port to Postgres, so
>> all differences
>> between PL/SQL and PL/pgSQL would just be unnecessary extra amount of
>> work
>> in the process of porting existing code into a new language, be it
>> PL/SQL or PL/pgSQL 2.
>>
>> That said, if PL/SQL wouldn't suffer from the problems I have with
>> PL/pgSQL today,
>> I wouldn't see a problem writing new code in the language, but then I
>> would probably
>> never manage to port all existing code to PL/SQL and I would be stuck
>> with a mix of code
>> in two languages instead of one. With PL/pgSQL 2 on the other hand, it
>> would be feasible
>> to eventually port all my existing code, as most of it would be
>> compatible without changes
>> and the rest would easy to make compatible.
>>
>> I guess it's a question of if it's more important to recruit Oracle
>> users,
>> or if it's more important to improve the life of existing PL/pgSQL
>> Postgres users.
>
>      I agree that for you, unfortunately, plpgsql2 would be better than
> PL/SQL. However, I believe as a whole a bigger majority of users would
> be benefited from this.

Is it even legal for us to create PL/SQL?

Beyond that in all likelihood having both a version two of the pl/pgsql
language and the pl/SQL language would be a desireable outcome for, say, a
10.0 release.

The former simply because languages by their very nature are evolutionary
and at some point the lost productivity of suppressing such evolution in the
name of backward compatibility will be deemed undesirable.  It may be
desirable to simply call the new language pl/elephant instead pl/pgsql2 but
the fundamental reason for evolving a language in order to incorporate newly
acquired knowledge is unarguable. Though in this case the entire
language/extension mechanism should be considered and not just the specific
procedural-SQL language we are dealing with here.

The goal of adding PL/SQL would be to increase the user base of the project
and hopefully attract new blood to the development team in order to maximize
long-term survivability and increase the pace of innovation.  We would be
unable to introduce substantial evolution to this language for that very
reason and so a different language is likely to be needed - eventually.

David J.



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