Re: OIDS (Re: [HACKERS] Well, then you keep your darn columns)

Peter,

Are you talking about make OID invisible ?
Please, don't do this. I have a good use of them to move backward and
forward in a set of rows
selected by interactive forms of any table.

Regards,

Ricardo Coelho.

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
To: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org>
Cc: Adriaan Joubert <a.joubert@albourne.com>; <pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 4:34 PM
Subject: OIDS (Re: [HACKERS] Well, then you keep your darn columns)


> On 2000-01-24, The Hermit Hacker mentioned:
>
> > Except, as Chris Bitmead brought up, OIDs appear to be a key requirement
> > in ODBMSs ... so, if we want to go what I *think* is 'next generation',
> > OIDs have to be kept ...
>
> Independent of everything else I would like to point out that although
> oids do appear in a central role in the theory of object oriented
> databases they are still not a user-level feature. The system uses them to
> in essence do what some people already do with them now: use them as links
> in foreign key settings. This sort of scheme is supposed to eliminate the
> need for costly joins, since you already know the location of the data
> (assuming that you have a scheme to map the oid to the storage location).
>
> This past summer this sort of idea was discussed around these parts and
> most of us came to the conclusion that a) OODBs are a pipe-dream at this
> point in time, and b) this is not worth doing in PostgreSQL as it stands.
> If we wanna become an OODBs we might as well say that now so we can start
> by dropping SQL and the optimizer and the storage manager -- okay, I'm
> being sarcastic (about OODBs).
>
> However, once again, users would have no knowledge of these "oids". The
> system is free to do whatever it wants in order to do its thing, in
> particular it is free to *change* oids when it needs it (because when it
> copies the data elsewhere it presumably needs to tag the location
> differently).
>
> Our oids are something different (though not sure what), PostgreSQL is
> something different. I am by all means against breaking what oids
> represent now, but incidentally I am also against them becoming (being) a
> user-level feature.
>
> --
> Peter Eisentraut                  Sernanders väg 10:115
> peter_e@gmx.net                   75262 Uppsala
> http://yi.org/peter-e/            Sweden
>
>
>
> ************