In article <44804377.8070706@dunslane.net>,
Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> Mark Woodward wrote:
>> Tom had posted a question about file compression with copy. I thought
>> about it, and I want to through this out and see if anyone things it is a
>> good idea.
>>
>> Currently, the COPY command only copies a table, what if it could operate
>> with a query, as:
>>
>> COPY (select * from mytable where foo='bar') as BAR TO stdout
>>
>>
> Isn't this already being worked on? The TODO list says:
> Allow COPY to output from views
IIRC Karel Zak posted a patch for that.
> Another idea would be to allow actual SELECT statements in a COPY.
> Personally I strongly favor the second option as being more flexible
> than the first.
How so? I see that
psql -h somehost somedb -c "copy 'somequery' to stdout" >localfile
would be more terse than
psql -h somehost somedb -c "create temp view tmp as somequery; copy tmp to stdout" >localfile
but what's more flexible there?