Re: [PATCH 4/4] Add tests to dblink covering use of COPY TO FUNCTION

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I thing, so this patch is maybe good idea. I am missing better
> function specification. Specification by name isn't enough - we can
> have a overloaded functions. This syntax doesn't allow to use explicit
> cast - from my personal view, the syntax is ugly - with type
> specification we don't need to keyword FUNCTION

As long as things continue to support the INTERNAL-type behavior for
extremely low overhead bulk transfers I am open to suggestions about
how to enrich things...but how would I do so under this proposal?

I am especially fishing for suggestions in the direction of managing
state for the function between rows though...I don't like how the
current design seems to scream "use a global variable."

> We have a fast copy statement - ok., we have a fast function ok, but
> inside a function we have to call "slow" sql query. Personally What is
> advantage?

The implementation here uses a type 'internal' for performance.  It
doesn't even recompute the fcinfo because of the very particular
circumstances of how the function is called.  It doesn't do a memory
copy of the argument buffer either, to the best of my knowledge.  In
the dblink patches you basically stream directly from the disk, format
the COPY bytes, and shove it into a waiting COPY on another postgres
node...there's almost no additional work in-between.  All utilized
time would be some combination of the normal COPY byte stream
generation and libpq.

This, of course, presumes that everyone who is interested in building
on this is going to use some UDFs written in C...

>
> We need pipes like
>
> like COPY table TO foo(..) TO table
>
> foo() should be a transformation function, or real pipe function

I've actually considered this pipe thing with a colleague while
driving home from work...it occurred to us that it would be nice to
have both pipes and tees (basically composition vs. mapping
application of functions over the input) in some form.  Not sure what
an elegant way to express that is or how to control it.  Since you can
work around this by composing or applying functions on your own in
another function, I'm not sure if that's as high priority for me
personally.

fdr