PostgreSQL has supported what are called Out (output) parameters since version 8.1.
We were surprised it has been that long since we always thought of it as a feature from 8.2+
until it recently came up for discussion on PostGIS newsgroup and we decided to investigate how
long it has been supported.
What are OUT parameters? These are parameters you define as part of the function argument
list that get returned back as part of the result. When you create functions, the arguments
are defaulted to IN parameters when not explicitly specified (which means they are passed in and not returned) which
is why you sometimes see PgAdmin do something like IN somevariable variabletype when you use
the function wizard.
You can have INOUT parameters as well which are function inputs that both get passed in, can be modified
by the function and also get returned.
As a side note - In 8.4, PostgreSQL was enhanced to allow dynamic sql RETURN QUERY using RETURN QUERY EXECUTE syntax for plpgsql queries and also
allow set returning functions being called in the SELECT part for any pl language. In prior versions,
this was only a feature of PL functions written in SQL.
8.3 introduced RETURN query which required a static sql statement, but did make things a bit easier.
One of the common use cases for using OUT parameters is to be able to return multiple outputs from a function without having
to declare a PostgreSQL type as output of the function. In this article we shall cover all variants of this. We'll just focus on sql and plpgsql for this
discussion, since we are not sure to what extent other pl languages (if at all) support IN OUT.
