Morris de Oryx <morrisdeoryx@gmail.com> writes:
> Given that Amazon is bragging this week about turning off Oracle, it seems
> like they could kick some resources towards contributing something to the
> Postgres project. With that in mind, is the idea of defining dictionaries
> within a table somehow meritless, or unexpectedly difficult?
Well, it'd just be totally different. I don't think anybody cares to
provide two separate definitions of common dictionaries (which'd have to
somehow be kept in sync).
As for why we did it with external text files in the first place ---
for at least some of the dictionary types, the point is that you can
drop in data files that are available from upstream sources, without any
modification. Getting the same info into a table would require some
nonzero amount of data transformation.
Having said that ... in the end a dictionary is really just a set of
functions implementing the dictionary API; where they get their data
from is their business. So in theory you could roll your own
dictionary that gets its data out of a table. But the dictionary API
would be pretty hard to implement except in C, and I bet RDS doesn't
let you install your own C functions either :-(
regards, tom lane