On 3/7/06,
Alvaro Herrera <
alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
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. AFAICS this patch does nothing you
> couldn't do much better with a quick search-and-replace over your
> application code. In short, I remain unsold.)
What I don't really understand is what part of this cannot be achieved
by changing the search_path. The only case I can think of is when you
have tables A and B in schemas R and S, but you want to use R.A and S.B.
So there's no way to change search_path for this. But is this really
the intended use case?
Not totally intended, but (unfortunately) used nonetheless.
I wonder whether synonyms were introduced in Oracle because of that idea
of theirs that each user has its own schema, and can access that schema
only; so to use a table in another schema you need to create a synonym.
We don't have that limitation so we don't need that usage either.
No, one could do fully qualified naming in Oracle; synonyms do have other purposes outside of this single one listed.
--
Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect
EnterpriseDB Corporation
732.331.1324
