Re: feature request: auto savepoint for interactive psql when in transaction.

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 04:19:30PM -0600, Ross Reedstrom wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 11:47:51AM -0700, David Fetter wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 02:25:44PM -0400, Gurjeet Singh wrote:
> > > On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Kevin Grittner <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov
> > > > wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > See ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK
> > > > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/app-psql.html
> > > >
> > > > I had missed that.  Dang, this database product is rich with nice
> > > > features!  :-)
> > > >
> > > 
> > > +1
> > > 
> > > I would like it to be on/interactive by default, though.
> > 
> > You can have it by putting it in your .psqlrc.
> > 
> > If we were just starting out, I'd be all for changing the defaults,
> > but we're not.  We'd break things unnecessarily if we changed this
> > default.
> > 
> 
> This discussion died out with a plea for better documentation, and perhaps some
> form of discoverability. I've scanned ahead and see no further discussion.
> However, I'm wondering, what use-cases would be broken by setting the default
> to 'interactive'? Running a non-interactive script by piping it to psql?
> Reading the code, I see that case is covered: the definition of 'interactive'
> includes both stdin and stdout are a tty, and the source of commands is stdin.
> Seems this functionality appeared in version 8.1.  Was there discussion re:
> making it the default at that time?  I'm all for backward compatibility, but I'm
> having trouble seeing what would break.
> 
> I see that Peter blogged about this from a different angle over a year ago
> (http://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2010/03/running-sql-scripts-with-psql.html)
> which drew a comment from Tom Lane that perhaps we need a better/different tool
> for running scripts. That would argue the defaults for psql proper should favor
> safe interactive use (autocommit off, anyone?) Peter mentioned the traditional
> method unix shells use to handle this: different config files are read for
> interactive vs. non-interactive startup. Seems we have that, just for the one
> setting ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK.

What documentation improvement are you suggesting?  The docs seem clear
to me.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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