[postgis-devel] RE: WKTRaster news from the Toronto CodeSprint?

[Stephen Frost]

Frank,

* Frank Warmerdam (warmerdam at pobox.com) wrote:
> Could you expand a bit on the "horrible" aspect?  Is the problem
> that RASTER_COLUMNS cannot practically be turned into a view?  That it
> is in the public schema?  That it will be hard to update appropriately?

I don't believe we've answered the question of if raster_columns could
be a view yet.  That's why I was asking after what the columns of the
table were, and I don't feel comfortable yet that I've gotten an answer
to that.  The spec seemed to include things that wouldn't go in the
table..

Certainly, I believe it would ideally be a view which lived in
pg_catalog to make it nice and transparent to the user.  One of my big
beefs with the current setup is the (ab)use of the public schema with an
assumption that it'll always be in a users search_path (which is just
flat-out wrong alot of the time for things I'm doing..).

Another big frustration point is having to use functions to add geometry
columns, and having to hand-update the tables for things like views that
have geometry columns in them.  Now that user typmods are a reality in
PG, we should really be looking to use them as much as possible.  That
would greatly improve the experience for PG admins who do things like
pg_dump individual schemas (w/o dumping the public schema, or even
wanting to reload the whole geometry_columns table..), create views,
etc.

> I've personally given up on the "making it a view" aspect, but there
> may be ways of mitigating other negative aspects of it.  I am just
> not clear on what the issue(s) are.

What is your concern about making these views?  Honestly, in the worst
case we'd have to do something like have a side-table that just creates
an ID for each new set of options given with the parameters similar to
the current tables and then have the view based on that.  At least for
users it would still be transparent since you can tailor the
input/output for the typmod to be something like:

mycolumn    geometry(4269,'POINT',2)

or whatever.

	Thanks,

		Stephen
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