Re: Gsoc2012 Idea --- Social Network database schema

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> One thing we should probably try to establish before you get started
> working on this is whether people want the feature, which is basically
> the ability to write something like this in the FROM clause of a
> query:

> table_name TABLESAMPLE { BERNOULLI | SYSTEM } ( sample_percent ) [
> REPEATABLE ( repeat_seed ) ] ]

> I have at present no position on whether we want that or not, but
> maybe someone else does.  The upside is that would be a more efficient
> replacement for the ORDER BY random() trick that is often used today;
> the downside is that it requires dedicated syntax and a whole new
> executor node for something that, realistically, isn't going to come
> up very often.

Yeah --- you're talking about chunks of new code in both planner and
executor.  A very rough estimate is that this might be about as
complicated to do properly as MergeAppend was (and we're still shaking
out the bugs in that :-().

Now that would all be fine if this were a widely-desired feature, but
AFAIR the user demand for it has been about nil.  So I'm leaning to
the position that we don't want it.
        regards, tom lane