Simplier prepared statement

[wavded]

You may have already dealt with this but it would be helpful to just use ? like in perl for a placeholder instead of $1 $2 etc... easier to type and don't have to worry about numbering. Just a thought.

[brianc]

So I've done some reading & it seems like the '?' syntax is only for drivers which do client-side substitution of prepared statement values. The "$1" "$2" syntax is the officially supported syntax of PostgreSQL. What driver did you previously use which used the '?' syntax? I'll dig deeper into how that driver was implemented & see why/how they used ?'s.

[wavded]

I've used DBI:Pg in Perl (http://search.cpan.org/~rudy/DBD-Pg-1.32/Pg.pm)

But now that you mention it, I think they do some server-side substitution before it gets to the database. I didn't know that was the internal syntax so maybe that's good to keep, it's just nicer to write:
...
sql += field + " = ? "
...

Then:
...
sql += field + " = $" + i
...

And have to keep track of the numbers, could be more error prone but not the end of the world either.

[brianc]

I'm going to close this one for now. Don't think adding ?'s instead of $1's is really the right move since the prepared statement happens on the server and the server demands $1 style parameters. In fact, I tried using ?'s and the server got angry at me. :)

Still considering implementing ? and $1 style replacement on the client side before sending to Postgres as an option, but it would have to be explicit with some pg.escape(string, [params]) type of function.