Re: A modest proposal vis hierarchical queries: MINUS in the column list

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> On 6/7/21 6:10 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Note that it's not like SQL hasn't heard of projections before.
>> You can always do "SELECT a, b, d FROM subquery-yielding-a-b-c-d".
>> So the proposed syntax would save a small amount of typing, but
>> it's not adding any real new functionality.

> True, but the problem happens when you have 250 fields and you want to
> skip 4 of them. Getting that right can be a pain.

I'm slightly skeptical of that argument, because if you have that
sort of query, you're most likely generating the query programmatically
anyway.  Yeah, it'd be a pain to maintain such code by hand, but
I don't see it being much of a problem if the code is built by
a machine.

Note that I'm not saying the idea is useless.  I'm just opining
that I'd rather wait for the SQL committee to do something in
this area.

            regards, tom lane