Greg Stark wrote: > > "scott.marlowe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Tom Lane wrote: > > > > > (Personally I think NATURAL JOIN is an evil, bug-prone construct, > > > precisely because coincidental matches of column names will mess up your > > > results.) > > > > Me too. When I first saw it, I figured it would "naturally join" the two > > tables on their fk/pk relation if there was one. That seems natural. > > Joining on two fields that just happen to have the same name is unnatural > > to me. > > Well 99% of the time I impose on myself a constraint to only use the same name > iff they refer to the same attribute. So if they have the same name then they > really ought to be a reasonable join clause. > > However the 1% are things like "date_created, date_updated" or even flags like > "active", "deleted" etc. Which are more than enough to make it utterly > useless. > > Too bad really, it would be a handy thing for ad-hoc queries typed at psql. It > would still seem too fragile for production queries though.
I think the reason they don't use pk/fk in natural joins is because you can join all sorts of results, like SELECT in FROM, that doesn't always have a meaningful pk/fk. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us [EMAIL PROTECTED] | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
