Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Design by committee

Design by committee is usually a term of abuse, but sometimes it's perhaps not the worst alternative. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is design by disconnected individuals. That is how you get
ALTER TABLE tbl OWNER TO something
but
ALTER TABLE tbl SET SCHEMA something
in PostgreSQL.

Maybe a committee faced with this inconsistency would arrive at the compromise

ALTER TABLE tbl [SET] {OWNER|SCHEMA} [TO] something
?

3 comments:

  1. Interesting. Did the ANSI committee require those syntaxes, or did the PG community make this inconsistency?

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  2. good idea. I have another one: Grants on Tables and Views is puzzling. If i set grant on a table with the same name as the view the table and the view both gets the new privileges. So there is no difference for postgres to differ between view grants and table grants. better would be: grant select on view xyz TO ...; and grant select on table xyz...

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