Re: help w/ a little naive brainstorming ...

On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 03:16:12PM -0800, OpenMacNews wrote:

> (1) does pgsql have/plan an equivalent of Oracle's External Tables?
>    <http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oracle9i/daily/sept19.html>

"The External Table feature allows for flat files, which reside
outside the database, to be accessed just like relational tables
within the database: the flat-file data can be queried and joined
to other tables using standard SQL."

You can implement this with a set-returning function that reads an
external source (flat file, spreadsheet, other kind of database,
etc.).  See for example DBI-link:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbi-link

With views and rules you might be able to implement update/delete
operations as well, although you wouldn't get transaction semantics.

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/