Re: patch: SQL/MED(FDW) DDL

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Heikki Linnakangas
<heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> On 15/09/10 21:21, Robert Haas wrote:
>>
>> I wonder if we might not think of the foreign data wrapper problem as
>> an instance of an even more general problem.  Right now, we have
>> semi-pluggable index access methods - it's probably not quite possible
>> to implement one as a standalone module because of XLOG, and maybe
>> other reasons, but at least there's some abstraction layer there.
>> Perhaps we should be thinking about a similar facility of table-access
>> methods.  What if someone wants to implement column-oriented storage,
>> or index-organized tables, or or tables that are really slow under
>> heavy write loads but can instantaneously compute SELECT COUNT(*) FROM
>> table, or mauve-colored tables with magic pixie dust?  I don't want to
>> raise the bar for this project to the point where we can never get it
>> off the ground, but if there's a way to avoid baking in the assumption
>> that only foreign tables can ever have special capabilities, that
>> might be valuable.
>
> Well, you could implement all that as a foreign data wrappers. Tables made
> out of pixie dust feels pretty foreign to me ;-).

Eh, maybe.  It doesn't seem like the best name, if we're actually
managing the underlying data blocks with our smgr layer, etc.

--
Robert Haas
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