Re: Bug? Function with side effects not evaluated in CTE - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Rowan Collins
Subject Re: Bug? Function with side effects not evaluated in CTE
Date
Msg-id 525F2BD2.4070209@gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Bug? Function with side effects not evaluated in CTE  (Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: Bug? Function with side effects not evaluated in CTE
Re: Bug? Function with side effects not evaluated in CTE
List pgsql-general
On 17/10/2013 00:06, Merlin Moncure wrote:
That being said, I do think it might be better behavior (and still
technically correct per the documentation) if volatile query
expressions were force-evaluated.

This sounds reasonable for a "yes or no" case like this, but wouldn't it raise the question of how many times the function should be evaluated?

What if the query looked more like this:

with tt_created as
(
    select fn_new_item(foo) as item
    from some_huge_table
)
select item
from tt_created
limit 10


Should the CTE be calculated in its entirety, running the function for every row in some_huge_table? Or should it run at most 10 times?

Which is desired would depend on the situation, but there's no real way to indicate in the syntax.
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

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