On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Andrew Dunstan<and...@dunslane.net> wrote: > > > Robert Haas wrote: >> >> I agree that ignoring extra columns is a bad idea, but I don't even >> like the idea of ignoring missing columns. It doesn't seem like a >> good idea to take a spreadsheet and feed it into COPY without doing >> any validation anyway, and this is the kind of thing that is trivial >> to clean up with a thin layer of Perl or your scripting language of >> choice. >> >> > > If it's an optional feature then I don't see why there is a problem. What > skin is it off anyone else's nose but those whose choose this behaviour?
I have to admit I'm usually an advocate of that way of thinking, so maybe I am all wet. I suppose it comes down to whether you think this particular feature is something with broad applicability, or whether there are 100 other equally plausible features. I wonder whether it would be appropriate to do something like implement a method by which copy could return text[] and then one could write wrappers around that functionality to do this as well as other things. For example, suppose you wanted to have rows of the form: A,B,C,X1,Y1,X2,Y2,X3,Y3 ...which gets transformed into an insert of (A,B,C) into a main table and (A,X1,Y1), (A,X2,Y2), (A,X3,Y3) into a side table. (I have actual knowledge of a widely-deployed system produced by a large company that outputs data in a format similar to this, though the actual format is considerably more complex.) ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
