If there's anyone interested in this stuff who's willing to sit down and investigate 9i in detail, I think it would be really useful to have a list of new SQL99-compliant features that would let us fold together aueries.
For instance being able to share outer join queries would remove a major source of pain when porting packages between PG and Oracle.
While we may not want to drop 8i support for the core in the near future, people who want to write new packages that support both PG and Oracle are free to decide to support whichever versions they want, IMO, especially if it simplifies the porting process (of course we have to support 9i before anyone can choose to not support 8i!)
Also ... should we just move ahead and for starters define permission_p() in each so we can at least remove this source of difference? For 4.7? I'm willing to personally go through and rip out all cr_item.get_live_revision()-style function calls for 4.7.
Just these two steps give us incremental progress in the right direction, no?
Though unfortunately we're still stuck with CONNECT BY vs. tree_sortkeys and many content queries will either use those or outer joins ...
