On 09/06/2014 12:17 PM, Marko Tiikkaja wrote:
> OK, fine. But that's not what I suggested on the wiki page, and is also
> not what I'm arguing for here right now. What the message you referred
> to was about was the condescending attitude where we were told to "think
> in terms of sets" (paraphrased), without considering whether that's even
> possible to do *all the time*.
SQL is, by definition, a set oriented language. The name Procedural
Language / pgSQL was supposed to suggest that this language adds some
procedural elements to the PostgreSQL database. I never intended to
create a 100% procedural language. It was from the very beginning, 16
years ago, intended to keep the set orientation when it comes to DML
statements inside of functions.
That means that you will have to think in sets *all the time*. The empty
set and a set with one element are still sets. No matter how hard you
try to make them special, in my mind they are not.
Regards,
Jan
--
Jan Wieck
Senior Software Engineer
http://slony.info