In the past three posts, we have written metaprograms to create functions for comparing objects of built-in types, user-defined distinct types, ROW types, and ordinary ARRAY types. In today’s post, we will write a single metaprogram that can create comparison functions for all four.

In the first post in this series, I introduced the concept of metaprogramming in SQL using dynamic SQL and applied the technique to write a procedure that could generate comparison functions that compare two objects of any basic type. In the second post, I expanded the procedure to produce comparison functions that compare two objects [...]

In the last post on this subject, we used dynamic SQL to generalize an integer comparison function into a stored procedure that builds comparison functions of any basic type. This served as a simple example, but did not really offer much benefit over using the ‘=’ operator. In today’s post, I will extend the same [...]

Metaprogramming can feel like magic. You call a function that you neither wrote nor imported from any library and, magically, it comes back with a result. Even more magical is how metaprogramming lets you do otherwise impossible things with your programming language. In “The Art of Metaprogramming”, Jonathan Bartlett’s developerWorks series, he lists three examples [...]