On 28 December 2010 14:53, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I'm with Peter on that. CTE is a completely meaningless term to most
> users.
I don't believe that that's the case. If CTE is a completely
meaningless term to most users, WITH query is even more meaningless. I
never refer to WITH queries in conversation, and I have never heard
someone else do so. I have often talked about CTEs though. Besides,
I'm not suggesting that we should completely change the title, or
change the section name at all, or change any existing text from the
docs. The doc patch is just a clarification that I believe will be
useful.
If I search for "common table expressions" on Wikipedia, I am sent to
the common table expressions article, without any re-direction. The
article doesn't mention "with query" as a synonym of CTE at any point.
If I search for "With query", the first page of results (20 articles)
doesn't have anything about CTEs at all. The situation with Google is
similar. The situation with postgresql.org is similar, except that
searching for CTE there is fairly useless too. Granted, all of this
may have something to do with the ambiguity of the term "with query"
in a more general context, but the fact that I never hear the term in
conversation probably has something to do with that too.
--
Regards,
Peter Geoghegan