> > Whilst you are working on the rules system it would be nice if
> > you could look for an oportunity to store the plain text rule
> > definition at creation time.
> > If the definition were stored in a table column it would allow us
> > to dump and restore databases in a more complete way.
> Yes, that would really be nice and I had something the like
> already in mind.
> I'm not really sure if it's a good thing to save the rules
> definition text instead of the parsetree. The advantages of
> doing so would be that the rule could easily be dumped and
> (more important) that the rules can have more complicated
> actions (remember that the currently stored parsetrees can
> quickly override the size limit of a text type).
>
> Storing the definition text only would require to parse at
> least the actions any time, a rule should be fired on a
> query. Bad for performance - but must check if significant
> bad.
How about storing both an internal form and the plain text source? That
way you can use the fast form internally and dump the plain text...
- Tom