On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Rod Taylor <rod.taylor@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It wouldn't be so bad if you could assign internal and external column names.
>
>> This is a good point. Uglifying the parameter names is sort of OK for
>> input parameters, but is much more annoying for output parameters.
>
> How much of this pain would go away if we changed over to the arguably
> correct (as in Or*cle does it that way) scoping for names, wherein the
> parser first tries to match a name against column names of tables of the
> current SQL statement, and only failing that looks to see if they are
> plpgsql variables?
This would solve all of my conflicts correctly. I nearly always use
RETURN QUERY with OUT parameters.
An alternative would be the requirement to prefix out parameters with
"out", "export", or something similar, so the plain non-prefixed name
is never replaced.
"b" in the below is the table.
I hit this quite a bit since my historical table name might be
"foo_bar_baz" which is the same as the most relevant name for the out
parameter.
I've debated renaming all of my tables t_* on more than one occasion
as a workaround in applications which exclusively use functions to
access/write data.
create or replace function read_some_data_from_data_region(a integer,
out b integer) as $$
begin SELECT col INTO out.b FROM b;
return;
end; $$ language plpgsql;
