Re: contrib and licensing

Tom Lane wrote:

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>On other Unixoid systems you can link against BSD-license libc code, or
>some-random-proprietary-license code from HP or Sun or whomever.  glibc
>doesn't have a monopoly in that sphere.  But mlw is offering code that
>will *only* run against a single implementation that is LGPL licensed.
>That makes it effectively LGPL.
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Here is my "vision" for  lack of a better term.

Server 'A' runs a "web services" version of a PostgreSQL server, (or any 
soap server) I have a working prototype that works.
Server 'B' runs a different instance of PostgreSQL.

With the ability to return multiple columns in a set of rows from a 
function, it should be possible to do this:

select foo.a, bar.b from foo, 
soapexec('http://somehost/pgsql?query=select+b+from+bar') as bar where 
foo.b = bar.b;

(or something to that effect, the SQL may not be perfect.)

To be able to do that, we need:

some HTTP request code
a solid XML/SOAP parser.
The "soapexec" function needs to be able to do a few things:
Return more than one column in a multirow set.
Find out the field names that are expected.
Find out the datatypes that are expected to be returned to the query.

Tom, when one creates a function, can the function tell, in an efficient 
way, what data types and names may be expected?

I have been talking about adding this feature to a few developers not 
involved with PostgreSQL, and they are finatic about the idea. As far as 
I can tell no other DB does this.



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