Making aggregate_builder available separately

[milgner]

I was looking at writing a new aggregate function using pgx and in the process stumbled over the aggregate_builder crate inside the TimescaleDB toolkit. At first I thought that I could just put

aggregate_builder = { git = "https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-toolkit.git", ref = "1.13.1" }

into my Cargo.toml and use it, but then it turned out that the generated code uses a couple of non-public utility functions from the main crate.

I think it would be really neat to have this available separately. What do you think about extracting the utility functions into their own crate, too, so they could be referenced and then making aggregate_builder available as a separate crate?

[epgts]

Hi Marcus!

Thanks for the suggestion.

This crate was an experiment that helped us a little but doesn't quite do what we want. It is, of course, available to you under the terms of the Timescale License, but we aren't going to be doing any work on it to make it easier to use outside toolkit.

The timing of your question is interesting, as I have been experimenting with another idea to help us build safer postgresql extensions. It, too, will be an early experiment and not something we are prepared to support outside of toolkit for the foreseeable future, but further down the road, who knows.

Thanks!

[milgner]

That's great to hear!
In the meantime I conducted some experiments with pgx and its aggregate functionality and found that it already covered the very basic usecase at hand very nicely.
But for some reason the timescaledb-toolkit source code had ranked further up in my search for Rust-based custom aggregates 😅