Re: Materialized views WIP patch

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 7:30 PM, Marko Tiikkaja <pgmail@joh.to> wrote:
> As others have pointed out, replacing the contents of a table is something
> which people have been wanting to do for a long time, and I think having
> this ability would make this patch a lot better; now it just feels like
> syntactic sugar.

I agree that it's mostly syntactic sugar, but I think we need to have
realistic expectations for what is possible in an initial patch.  When
I committed the first patch for foreign data wrappers, it didn't work
at all: it was just syntax support.  Tom later committed a follow-on
patch that made them work.  Similarly, I split the event trigger patch
into two halves, one of which added the syntax support and the other
of which made them functional: and even with both commits in, I think
it's fair to say that event triggers are still in a fairly primitive
state.

None of those patches were small patches.  It's going to take multiple
years to get materialized views up to a state where they're really
useful to a broad audience in production applications, but I don't
think we should sneer at anyone for writing a patch that is "just
syntactic sugar".  As it turns out, adding a whole new object type is
a lot of work and generates a big patch even if it doesn't do much
just yet.  Rejecting such patches on the grounds that they aren't
comprehensive enough is, IMHO, extremely unwise; we'll either end up
landing even larger patches that are almost impossible to review
comprehensively and therefore more likely to break something, or else
we'll kill the projects outright and end up with nothing.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company