On 2010-12-29 09:16, Mark Kirkwood wrote:
On 29/12/10 03:35, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
On tis, 2010-12-28 at 00:19 +0000, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
It's worth noting that officially (i.e. in the docs), we don't even
call CTEs CTEs at any point. We call them WITH queries. I think that
that's a mistake because we call them CTEs everywhere else.
I think "WITH query" or "WITH clause" is more understandable than CTE,
which to me is a term that has no relationship with anything else.
Peter's comment certainly resonates with me. When I first heard about
this "CTE" business I had to go to the web to discover that they were
components of the WITH clause - which I was familiar with from my DB2
days...
For me it was the converse.. I first heard of Common Table Expressions
from SQLserver users, at roughly the same time that CTE's were
introduced in 8.4. When I decided to use them, it took me a while to
figure out the docs refered to it as "WITH queries".
ISTM we're already past the choice to have a single name. IMHO it would
be best if the documentation has a reference / index part in which both
WITH queries and Common Table Expressions (CTE) are listed.
Also, the terms CTE and CTEScan appear in EXPLAIN output, it would be
nice to have a meaningful hit when looking for the term in the
documentation page, instead of 'Your search for *cte* returned no hits.'
regards,
Yeb Havinga
