On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 3:28 PM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Sorry: "make sense" was a poorly chosen phrase there. What I was > doubting, and continue to doubt, is that 100% checking of what > you can check without catalog access and 0% checking of the rest > is a behavior that end users will find especially useful.
You might be right, but my guess is that you're wrong. Syntax highlighting is very popular, and seems like a more sophisticated version of that same concept. I don't personally like it or use it myself, but I bet I'm hugely in the minority these days. And EDB certainly gets customer requests for syntax checking of various kinds; whether this particular kind would get more or less traction than other things is somewhat moot in view of the low likelihood of it actually happening. > I'm less enthusiatic about this than you are. I think it would likely > produce a slower and less maintainable system. Slower because we'd > need more passes over the query: what parse analysis does today would > have to be done in at least two separate steps. Less maintainable > because knowledge about certain things would end up being more spread > around the system. Taking your example of getting syntax checking to > recognize invalid EXPLAIN keywords: right now there's just one piece > of code that knows what those options are, but this'd require two. > Also, "run the first set of checks and then decide whether to proceed > further" seems like optimizing the system for broken queries over > valid ones, which I don't think is an appropriate goal. Well, we've talked before about other problems that stem from the fact that DDL doesn't have a clear separation between parse analysis and execution. I vaguely imagine that it would be valuable to clean that up for various reasons. But I haven't really thought it through, so I'm prepared to concede that it might have various downsides that aren't presently obvious to me. > Now, I don't say that there'd be *no* benefit to reorganizing the > system that way. But it wouldn't be an unalloyed win, and so I > share your bottom line that the costs would be out of proportion > to the benefits. I'm glad we agree on that much, and don't feel a compelling need to litigate the remaining differences between our positions, unless you really want to. I'm just telling you what I think, and I'm pleased that we think as similarly as we do, despite remaining differences. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
