Re: ORDER BY in prepared statements

Paul Jungwirth wrote
> I'm not sure how to make a prepared statement that lets you name a
> column when you execute it. Maybe someone else can chime in if that's
> possible.

David J. responded
> You cannot.  By definition parameters, in this context, are values - not
> identifiers.  
> [...]
> In both situations there is no way for the planner to plan and cache a
> single query whose order by column varies.  No matter what you do at best
> you can have a single plan for each explicit order by column that you wish
> to specify.

That's what I'd figured. The motivation to use prepared statements in 
application layers is not so much having a single plan but more the 
insulation from SQL injection. The intent of the given ORDER BY example was 
to restricts inputs to valid identifiers rather than part of the query 
expression. 

Maybe what we need in ODBC libs and the like is a "protected 
statement" that follows the same construction as a prepared statement but 
additionally checks catalogs to validate identifiers.

Bryn