On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 2:04 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote: > > Maybe we could consider a more extensible syntax that is attached to > > the contained SELECT rather than the containing WITH. Then CTEs would > > be less special; there'd be a place to put hints controlling top-level > > queries, subselects, views etc too (perhaps eventually join hints, > > parallelism hints etc, but "materialize this" would be just another > > one of those things). That'd be all-in. > > I think you have some purity arguments here, but the likelihood of us > developing a full-blown solution is not that high, and the lack of > inlinable CTEs is *really* hurting us. As long as the design doesn't > block a full solution, if we go there, I think it's a very acceptable > blemish in comparison to the benefits we'd get.
Also, it seems to me that this is properly a property of the individual WITH clause, not the query as a whole.
I mean I suppose we could do
WITH or_with_out_you OPTIONS (materialized false) AS (SELECT 'mariah carey') SELECT ...
That'd allow for extensibility, have the write scope, and look like what we do elsewhere. It looks a little less elegant than
WITH cte_name [[NOT] MATERIALIZED] AS (query) main_query...
...but maybe elegance for extensibility is a good trade.
I like this explicit syntax (both variant can be used). From my perspective, it is much better than hints in comments.