I'm a PostgreSQL novice but a very, very experienced DBA from the SAP SQL Anywhere context (formerly Sybase / iAnywhere). Most of my code has been in the Watcom SQL dialect in the past.
SAP's products have a nice feature not found in the ANSI standards for the INSERT ... SELECT syntax: WITH AUTO NAME. Assume you have a table that looks something like this:
In PostgreSQL, you can:
INSERT INTO TableX
(
i,
j,
k
)
SELECT a,
b,
c
FROM TableY; -- or whatever SELECT expression you want returning possibly many rows
This is nice, but it's so much nicer to have the destination columns adjacent to your source values:
INSERT INTO TableX
WITH AUTO NAME
SELECT a i,
b j,
c k
FROM TableY;
I'm not complaining here, but just wondering if there is a way that the syntax can be extended at this level using an extension, or if there is a fighting chance of extending the syntax in the base product?
Thanks,
Matthew Mellon
