Re: MERGE ... RETURNING

On Wed, 2023-11-01 at 10:12 +0000, Dean Rasheed wrote:
> Something I'm wondering about is to what extent this discussion is
> driven by concerns about aspects of the implementation (specifically,
> references to function OIDs in code), versus a desire for a different
> user-visible syntax. To a large extent, those are orthogonal
> questions.

Most of my concern is that parts of the implementation feel like a
hack, which makes me concerned that we're approaching it the wrong way.

At a language level, I'm also concerned that we don't have a way to
access the before/after versions of the tuple. I won't insist on this
because I'm hoping that could be solved as part of a later patch that
also addresses UPDATE ... RETURNING.

> (As an aside, I would note that there are already around a dozen
> references to specific function OIDs in the parse analysis code, and
> a
> lot more if you grep more widely across the whole of the backend
> code.)

If you can point to a precedent, then I'm much more inclined to be OK
with the implementation.

Regards,
    Jeff Davis