On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 08:23:56AM +0200, Thomas Kellerer wrote: > Philippe Lang, 13.07.2009 08:05: >> Hi, >> >> Now that Postgresql 8.4 has a "WITH RECURSIVE" operator (thanks! >> :)), is there a chance we can see one day "START WITH... CONNECT >> BY" in Postgresql, or is that something 100% oracle-specific? > > START WITH is Oracle specific whereas recursive CTEs are an ANSI > Standard (supported by PostgreSQL, Firebird and SQL Server). Not to mention DB2. I'm not sure how close Firebird is to actually shipping them... > As far as I can tell anything you can do with CONNECT BY can be done > with WITH RECURSIVE (including ORDER SIBLINGS BY), it's just a bit > more "noise" because you need to write more stuff (I wish the ANSI > standard had adopted the CONNECT BY, it's really very elegant) I don't. Apart from any IP issues that may obtain, CONNECT BY gets its "elegance" for simple queries at the cost of nightmarish kludginess for queries not quite as simple. I have a book by a current Oracle employee--Vadim Tropashko's SQL Design Patterns--that bemoans the lack of availability of CTEs in Oracle. Once you get used to CTEs, you'll wonder how you ever programmed in SQL without them :) Cheers, David. -- David Fetter <david@xxxxxxxxxx> http://fetter.org/ Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david.fetter@xxxxxxxxx Remember to vote! Consider donating to Postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
