Re: inherit support for foreign tables

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 5:05 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> 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.

Well, there's some point to that, too, I suppose.  What do others think?

-- 
Robert Haas
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