On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 17:14 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > (Actually, I don't think the case for table synonyms has been made > adequately either; "Oracle has it" is *not* enough reason to take on > another feature that we'll have to maintain forever, especially given > that we're being told that one of the major use-cases for synonyms > isn't going to be supported.
I'm inclined to agree. The points raised about the difficulties of managing large numbers of schemas are legitimate, but I don't see that synonyms are a very effective solution. If we're going to make it less painful to work on applications with many tens of schemas, that's a worthwhile project, but I think we should take a fresh look at the problem rather than just blindly copying a construct from Oracle. BTW, AFAICS synonyms for tables and views can be approximated by views: you pay a small runtime hit to expand the view definition, but that's fairly cheap for a simple view. Synonyms for functions can be approximated by shell functions defined in SQL -- those can even be inlined, reducing the amount of overhead. It's not as easy to define synonyms for sequences, but that is hardly justification for the feature. -Neil ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings