On Friday 30 September 2005 11:49, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 10:20:34AM -0500, Tony Caduto wrote:
> > Tom,
> > I hardly think the overhead would be significant on modern processors, I
> > don't think the majority of users are running on Pentium 90s.( I am
> > assuming you mean a performance overhead)
>
> Um, please read the documention. Returning a tuple is *significantly*
> more expensive than returning a single value. You have to get the tuple
> descriptor, allocate memory for the tuple, fill in all the fields with
> your data... For a single value you just return it.
>
ISTM it is better for us to be consistent with the visible behavior than to
have two different behaviors for out param functions just so one can be
faster. That way if people are concerned about the speed difference, they
can rewrite the function without an out param... afaict, as it stands now
you've given them no choice and are forcing them to handle two different
scenarios.
--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL