On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Brian Aker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi! > > On Aug 12, 2008, at 4:26 PM, Baron Schwartz wrote: > >> Even if it's not pluggable, I see no good reason that I shouldn't be >> able to make a VARCHAR column auto-update to the current time. (Or >> current date, or whatever). > > > Do you want to be able to run an arbitrary function?
Yes. Arbitrary SQL expressions would be nice too. I don't see it happening every day, but... create table user ( user_id int, game_points int, rank int on update (select count(*) from user where game_points >= this.game_points) ); It's an absurd example, and would be better done as a trigger, but if it's pluggable, why not let people do stuff like this? I'm struggling to think of a better example -- something like setting the user active when they log in, but you'd just do that with an UPDATE... dammit, examples ought to come out of the woodwork here... I see this as being parser hell. So IMO constraints and defaults would be better off implemented separately, stored separately from the table definition, and sort of "attached" to the table the way you would attach a listener in an object-oriented programming language (take your pick of design patterns there). The more I talk the more I'm thinking this is just triggers by a different name. Which is what timestamp's current functionality really is. Oh, I know what would be useful -- create table urls ( url varchar(1000), url_crc int on update crc32(url_varchar), key(url_crc) ) Again it's a trigger in a different guise, but maybe there's a sweet spot here. And this last example sucks because all it demonstrates is the need to index a function: create table urls ( url varchar(1000), key(crc32(url_crc)) ) OK I give up. But there's something useful in here, I just can't articulate it. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
