Re: Postgres Analysis Tool-Pak

Mike Mascari <mascarm@mascari.com> writes:
> I've been able to implement around 300 of the 320 Excel-style
> functions and was wondering if they would be useful to
> PostgreSQL.

Seems like we could certainly stick these into a contrib directory.
I'd be a little hesitant to cram so many names into the default
installation, for fear of conflicting with existing user setups ---
but a contrib distribution has no such constraint.  (Also, aren't
some of these the same as ODBC-standard functions?  I believe Thomas
has been working on including all the ODBC functions into the backend,
so you could save him some work there.)

> Or I could just wait until the rewrite if the function call interface
> is going to change dramatically for this such as NULL handling etc.

What I have done so far cleans up NULL handling, but I have not tried to
do anything about functions accepting or returning sets.  I think the
plan is to see if we can support set functions better as part of the
querytree redesign scheduled for 7.2.
        regards, tom lane