To: Scott Lamb <slamb@slamb.org>
Cc: pgsql-interfaces@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Incremental results from libpq 
In-reply-to: <4D426B54-E08F-4DE9-9776-D46610CA4968@slamb.org> 
References: <4D426B54-E08F-4DE9-9776-D46610CA4968@slamb.org>
Comments: In-reply-to Scott Lamb <slamb@slamb.org>
	message dated "Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:36:29 -0800"
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 16:22:08 -0500
Message-ID: <19391.1131571328@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

Scott Lamb <slamb@slamb.org> writes:
> Is there a better way?

Not at the moment.  It's been requested before though, so if you want to
develop a patch for libpq, have at it.

The main reason why libpq does what it does is that this way we do not
have to expose in the API the notion of a command that fails part way
through.  If you support partial result fetching then you'll have to
deal with the idea that a SELECT could fail after you've already
returned some rows to the client.  I am not sure that this is a huge
deal, but it definitely uglifies the API a bit.  It would be a good
idea to think through exactly what clients will need to do to cope with
that fact before you start designing the API extension.

			regards, tom lane