textarray option for file FDW

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>

From: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
To: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2011-01-15T17:29:24Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
I've been waiting for the latest FDW patches as patiently as I can, and 
I've been reviewing them this morning, in particular the file_fdw patch 
and how it interacts with the newly exposed COPY API. Overall it seems 
to be a whole lot cleaner, and the wholesale duplication of the copy 
code is gone, so it's much nicer and cleaner. So now I'd like to add a 
new option to it: "textarray". This option would require that the 
foreign table have exactly one field, of type text[], and would compose 
all the field strings read from the file for each record into the array 
(however many there are). This would require a few changes to 
contrib/file_fdw/file_fdw.c and a few changes to 
src/backend/commands/copy.c, which I can probably have done in fairly 
short order, Deo Volente. This will allow something like:

    CREATE FOREIGN TABLE arr_text (
         t text[]
    )  SERVER file_server
    OPTIONS (format 'csv', filename '/path/to/ragged.csv', textarray
    'true');
    SELECT t[3]::int as a, t[1]::timestamptz as b, t[99] as not_there
    FROM arr_text;

Thoughts?

cheers

andrew