[jihadjihad]

It seems at first to be a toy or silly intellectual exercise, but after reading the whole thing it really feels like an example of how constraints can lead to creative solutions. Can't log to stdout in the recursive CTE's loop? Maybe `RAISE NOTICE` will work. Can't take user input from the query itself? What if we stored the input in a table locally and read from that instead with `dblink`?

It's just a lot of fun, kudos for hacking this together, this is the sort of thing that makes me love software so much.

[nffaria]

Thanks for the kind words, it was exactly like you described. Many times I thought it would not be possible after hitting some of those walls, but luckily there was always a way around them.

[tanelpoder]

I once wrote a top-like tool in Oracle's sqlplus client, that is not designed for building self-refreshing terminal UI display apps. Just to see if I could do it, had to get creative too. Used pipelined PL/SQL functions with never-ending output stream and a sleep function within it and had to carefully match the sqlplus "fetch array size" with number of rows returned in a batch from the pipelined function. Called it MOATS - the Mother of All Tuning Scripts - and then someone took the idea further and built v2.0 with added colors and charts, etc:

The v2.0 UI GIF is here: https://github.com/dbsid/moats_rac

[written-beyond]

I will admit that in the past I've used `RAISE NOTICE` quite frequently for debugging difficult to navigate PL/pgSQL procedures.