Jonah H. Harris wrote:
> On 8/4/06, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>
>> It's a pity that some expectations have been raised about features that
>> we haven't seen patches for, MERGE/UPSERT & recursive queries
>
>
> Honestly, I've only had four people say it would be nice to have
> hierarchical queries (one of them wasn't even a PostgreSQL user).
> Almost everyone else seems to ask some variation of, "what's a
> hierarchical query and why do I need it?" It's hard to get excited
> about writing a patch no one sees a real need for.
>
> When I have a choice of working on things in my spare time, I choose
> what to work on based on basically two things (a) what is my interest
> in it and (b) who is going to use it. Based on that, I determine
> whether it's worth going through the hassle of design, development,
> testing, and final documentation (my prelim docs come from design).
>
> In short, I know a lot of people would probably use this feature after
> it was there, but *very* few have shown any interest in it and a patch
> for it (while in need of rewriting) has existed since 7.4.
>
Chicken vs. egg. Look at the number of people using nested sets and
other similar abominations to handle hierarchical data. There are whole
books written about using these kludgy techniques. I think this really
is a case of "build it and they will come".
cheers
andrew
