Re: inherit support for foreign tables

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I think this is totally misguided.  Who's to say that some weird FDW
>> might not pay attention to attstorage?  I could imagine a file-based
>> FDW using that to decide whether to compress columns, for instance.
>> Admittedly, the chances of that aren't large, but it's pretty hard
>> to argue that going out of our way to prevent it is a useful activity.

> I think that's a pretty tenuous position.  There are already
> FDW-specific options sufficient to let a particular FDW store whatever
> kinds of options it likes; letting the user set options that were only
> ever intended to be applied to tables just because we can seems sort
> of dubious.  I'm tempted by the idea of continuing to disallow SET
> STORAGE on an unvarnished foreign table, but allowing it on an
> inheritance hierarchy that contains at least one real table, with the
> semantics that we quietly ignore the foreign tables and apply the
> operation to the plain tables.

[ shrug... ] By far the easiest implementation of that is just to apply
the catalog change to all of them.  According to your assumptions, it'll
be a no-op on the foreign tables anyway.
        regards, tom lane