David Fetter writes the PostgreSQL Weekly News, contributes patches to the PostgreSQL source code, helps with the web and sysadmins team, and gives talks on PostgreSQL wherever people wish to hear them. He is a founder of PostgreSQL Experts, Inc.

Marko Tiikkaja is studying computer science at the University of Helsinki. He has been programming computers since he was six years old. Marko started seriously appreciating Free Software in 2003 when he started using PostgreSQL 7.4. In his free time he enjoys jogging.

In the SQL standard, Common Table Expressions (CTEs) are a way of

creating and using views at run time, but only in read queries. Here we create ways to use them in writes. We plan to make all parts of CTEs writeable, starting with the insides of the CTEs as in,

  WITH t AS (DELETE FROM foo RETURNING *) ...

We also plan to make the outside of the table expression writeable, as in:

  WITH t AS (SELECT ....) INSERT INTO foo...
  WITH t AS (SELECT ....) UPDATE foo...
  WITH t AS (SELECT ....) DELETE FROM foo...

Further plans include making the writeable CTEs recursive. This is still in the design stage.