Re: Proposal to add --single-row to psql

On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 06:08:28PM -0500, Jim Nasby wrote:
> I believe that makes it significantly harder for them to actually
> contribute code back that doesn't give them a business advantage, as
> well as making it harder to justify hacking on the community
> codebase because they'll just face a very large hurdle when it comes
> to pulling that code back into their proprietary product.
>
> I don't know of any good way to solve that problem. Maybe it's not
> worth solving... but I do suspect there's some useful stuff that the
> community has lost out on because of this.

Some of this is getting solved by making PostgreSQL more pluggable in
ways that isolate the proprietary stuff, i.e. make people not have to
touch the PostgreSQL core code much, if at all, in order to provide
whatever special features they provide.  Hooks and FDWs are two such
pluggable components.