Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com> writes:
> The point being, how do I convert any query to a non WITH variant so
> it can be PERFORM'd? Anyways, I always thought having to do perform
> at all was pretty weak sauce -- not sure why it's required.
Possibly it was an Oracle compatibility thing ... anyone know PL/SQL
well enough to say how this works there?
I suppose you could argue that selecting a value and implicitly throwing
it away is confusing to novices, but on the other hand I've seen a whole
lot of novices confused by the need to write PERFORM instead of SELECT.
I think it wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to just interpret a SELECT
with no INTO clause as being a PERFORM (ie execute and discard results).
Then we'd not have to do anything magic for commands starting with WITH.
regards, tom lane
