Oracle 9i supports standard SQL outer join syntax, so there's a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel - when we move to the point of not supporting 8i many queries can be rewritten in a way common to both RDBMSs.
Janine ... when we first discussed supporing both Oracle and PG and (potentially) other RDBMSs there was a lot of discussion of the merits of putting conditionalized queries inline in .tcl files and doing separate query files. Both solutions have inherent uglinesses about them, the queryfile approach was adopted as the lesser of evils solution after a bunch of discussion among those who were going to do the porting.
I could adopt to either using query files exclusively or dumping them entirely, though. It's this notion of having some of the toolkit programmed one way, the rest another way that irks me.
We already support too many different ways of doing different things IMO - look at the recent discussion regarding ad_proc parameter conventions!
This is just how I feel, though ...
