Frank Missel <i...@missel.sg> wrote: > As for the advantages, I just don't see how it could be practical to have an > arbitrary group value together with the total number of records in an > application.
Sometimes, you know that the value of a particular column is in fact unique across the group (in which case it doesn't matter which row it's taken from). This knowledge could come from invariants being maintained that are not perhaps formally captured in the database schema, or else flow from the particular join and WHERE conditions. In such cases (which come up surprisingly often, in my experience), it's convenient to be able to just use the column name. I also work with MySQL a bit, which doesn't allow that, so you have to wrap the column name in min() or max() (doesn't matter which, as all values are the same). Personally, I find it annoying. It makes the database engine do unnecessary comparisons, thus hurting performance (though I admit that the difference is likely to be immeasurably small), and more importantly, it makes the statement more verbose and difficult to read and understand. Now, if there were some kind of a PRAGMA that would turn this behavior off and enforce stricter syntax rules, I wouldn't be against it. I'd likely just never use it. Please feel free to try and convince SQLite developers (of which I'm not) to add such a pragma (but don't expect me to pitch in for the cause). -- Igor Tandetnik _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
