On 5/24/16 8:52 PM, Craig Ringer wrote: > Absolutely, and I use OO heavily. But a half-assed "object relational" > feature in the database that only kind-of works isn't OO, and it's > generally less useful than using existing relational-to-oo modelling > techniques like FK-related 1:1 child tables for specialisation.
How is it less useful than that? To me, the FK "solution" is the absolute worst of everything: you still have all the separate child tables that you must explicitly query *and* you have to get all the joins correct as well. And hope it doesn't have horrible performance.
Note that there was enough enthusiasm to adopt whole new database engines, but not enough to use PostgreSQL's existing features for that. Partly because they suck. In particular, people looking for this tend to want to be able to create new subtypes without having to mess around making schema changes and modelling everything.
Which is a decision people have come to regret, because then your codebase somehow has to deal with 38 different versions of what a "customer" is.
There's much more future in improving document-structured storage like jsonb, and possibly extending in future toward hybrid storage with some normal cols and some dynamic cols, than with Pg's pseudo-object-relational inheritance feature.
I don't see why we can't do both. There's many cases where more flexibility in what output tuples look like would be very valuable. The JSON features are one aspect; crosstab is another.
Postgres is well past the point where our relational features are the big selling point. It's now about scale, an incredibly robust storage engine, and all the extensiblity opportunities. We've moved from being an RDBMS to being a "Data Platform". Improving our OO capabilities just continues that.
-- Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX Experts in Analytics, Data Architecture and PostgreSQL Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com 855-TREBLE2 (855-873-2532) mobile: 512-569-9461 -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
