Re: Proposal: variant of regclass

On 2013-12-04 20:25:53 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@sraoss.co.jp> writes:
> > I would like to add a variant of regclass, which is exactly same as
> > current regclass except it does not raise an error when the target
> > table is not found. Instead it returns InvalidOid (0).
> 
> I've sometimes thought we should just make all the reg* input converters
> act that way.  It's not terribly consistent that they'll happily take
> numeric inputs that don't correspond to any existing OID.  And more
> often than not, I've found the throw-an-error behavior to be annoying
> not helpful.

I find that to be a bit of a scary change. I have seen application check
for the existance of tables using the error thrown by ::regclass. Now,
they could change that to check for IS NULL which would be better for
them performancewise, but the likelihood they will notice in time seems
small.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

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