Re: damage control mode

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
>>> As between the two, I get the feeling that there is more interest in
>>> writeable CTEs.  But that impression might be wrong, since it's an
>>> unscientific recollection of discussions on -hackers; which are
>>> themselves not representative of anything.
>>
>> Writeable CTE is definitely the bigger feature.  Effectively, it allows
>> people to do in a single query data-transformation operations which
>> would have taken a stored procedure before.  Think of it as comparable
>> to the introduction of callbacks in Perl for coolness.
>
> Now if I knew what callbacks in Perl were, I'd probably be impressed.
> You mean closures?
>
>>> I have not looked at the window functions patch at all, and I haven't
>>> looked at the latest version of writeable CTEs, either.  I will try to
>>> spend some time on it in the next couple of days.  My feeling about
>>> the last version is that it lacked a lot in the documentation
>>> department, and also in the comments department.  Since I don't know
>>> that code very well, that made it hard for me to assess technical
>>> correctness.
>>
>> Hmmm, that's potentially lethal.  David Fetter has been doing a lot of
>> presentations on the feature; surely he could turn them into some
>> documentation?  David?
>
> I would be 100% in favor of some more help on the documentation.  I do
> plan to reread this patch, but I don't know that I can cover the
> amount of work that needs to be done myself, and as you say, lack of
> adequate documentation could very well kill this patch.  In fact, I'll
> go so far as to say it's one of the most likely reasons why this patch
> might not get in.  So any resources we can bring to bear on that issue
> would be well spent.

I'm on board to work on the documentation.  I think with a few hours
of work it should be in a reasonable state.

merlin