On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 03:57:38PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > Gregory Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > AFAIK the state of the art is actually to load the data into a table which > > closely matches the source material, sometimes just columns of text. Then > > copy > > it all to another table doing transformations. Not impressed. > > I liked the idea of allowing COPY FROM to act as a table source in a > larger SELECT or INSERT...SELECT. Not at all sure what would be > involved to implement that, but it seems a lot more flexible than > any other approach.
I'm not sure why new syntax is needed, what's wrong with having a simple set of procedures like: readtsv(filename TEXT) AS SETOF RECORD You'd then be free to do whatever "transformations" you wanted: INSERT INTO table (i,j) SELECT i, MIN(j::INTEGER) FROM readtsv("file.dat") x(i INTEGER, j TEXT) WHERE j ~ '^[0-9]+$' GROUP BY i; You could even have a readlines(filename) procedure that just gives you back a SETOF TEXT and you can do the parsing yourself. An associated regexp split to RECORD would be nice then. Sam -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers