On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 3:02 PM Anton A. Melnikov <aamelnikov@inbox.ru> wrote:
Hello!
Please, could somebody explain what the "compound" queries were created for? Maybe i'm calling them wrong. It's about queries like: SELECT 1 + 2 \; SELECT 2.0 AS "float" \; SELECT 1;
Such queries can neither be prepared nor used in the extended protocol with ERROR: cannot insert multiple commands into a prepared statement. What are their advantages? And what is the proper name for such queries? "Compound" or something else? Would be very grateful for clarification.
I suspect they came about out of simplicity - being able to simply take a text file with a bunch of SQL commands in a script and send them as-is to the server without any client-side parsing and let the server just deal with it. It works because the system needs to do those kinds of things anyway so, why not make it user-facing, even if most uses would find its restrictions makes it undesirable to use.
