I share your sentiments. Still, all is not lost. I was happy to hear of the generate_series thing. I don't know how directly this can be transposed to another DB, (thinking of Oracle here), but I do know that at times it can be nice to have a select generate a huge amount of arbitary data on the fly.

The other day I needed to blend the numbers 1..19999 into a select, and after considering a select ... union select from dual for about a microsecond, I created a table with a single column containing the numbers from 1 to 19999. Sort of ugly, but it got the job done.