> You and Josh seem to be strong proponents of rules for reasons other
> than "I just don't want to break applications". That's not too many
> to ask both of you: can you itemize your use cases and how important
> you feel they are?
Well, my main issue is actually that I don't want to break people's
applications. I seldom use RULEs myself.
The one area where I do is handling bulk loading for partitioning or
other table redirection. For this case, rules are much, much, much (as
in 100X) faster than row-at-a-time triggers.
Could statement triggers and MERGE be improved to replace this? Pretty
much certainly. Have they been? No.
Also, I'll point out that surveying -hackers for feature usage is a
pretty skewed group. A bunch of the people on this list (maybe most of
them) don't develop applications -- some never have. If we think
surveying usage affects our plans for deprecation, then we ought to
survey a less select group of users.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com