I am returning back to processing records in plpgsql.
I am thinking so it can be simply processed with transformations to array.
Now we have similar functions - hstore(row), row_to_json, ... but using of these functions can be a useless step. Any row variable can be transformed to 2D text array.
How is it useless? Why wouldn't you just use JSON and be done with it?
We can use a FOREACH IN ARRAY iteration in plpgsql (second variant is a implementation FOREACH for jsonb)
so ROW->ARRAY is shorter than ROW->JSON->ARRAY or ROW->HSTORE->ARRAY
I think the real problem here is that we're inventing a bunch of different ways to do the same thing: iterate over a set. Instead of doing that, should we add the idea of an iterator to the type system? That would make sense for arrays, hstore, json and XML.
what do you think? How this can be implemented?
Do you have some use cases you can share?
processing of NEW, OLD variables in triggers
Note that last time I checked you couldn't do something like NEW.variable, and I don't think you could use EXEC to do it either. So there's more needed here than just converting a record to an array.
