> > Ross, you make some powerful arguments here. Probably the most
> > significant was the idea that you need a unique identifier for every
> > row, and it should be of a consistent type, which primary key is not.
>
> I don't see why you need a unqiue identifier per row, nor do I see why,
> if you are going to have one, it needs to be the same type across all
> tables.
If i had table with multi col primary key like...
create table devices ( major int4, minor int4, primary key (major, minor));
... and do this:
insert into devices (major, minor values (224, find_free_minor_for(224))
should the database report something like
INSERT '{<([\'224\', \'89\'])>}' 1
which I could then parse in my client program and try to recover my
fresh brand new primary key from it? No thanks...
Anyways, I've got an idea: what about having option that INSERTs return
"oid_status" in form
major = '224' and minor = '10'
or state = 'ca'
?
Then you could just throw this expression into a select query after where
;P And tables would never need row oids...
--
Antti Haapala
