On 11.02.23 20:24, Andres Freund wrote:
Not useful column names:
SELECT SUM(reads), SUM(writes) FROM pg_stat_io;
column names: sum, sum
So i often end up manually writing:
SELECT SUM(reads) AS sum_reads, SUM(writes) AS sum_writes, ... FROM pg_stat_io;
Of course we can't infer useful column names for everything, but for something
like this, it should't be too hard to do better. E.g. by combining the
function name with the column name in the argument, if a single plain column
is the argument.
I think on a green field it'd be clearly better to do something like the
above. What does give me pause is that it seems quite likely to break
existing queries, and to a lesser degree, might break applications relying on
inferred column names
Can anybody think of a good way out of that? It's not like that problem is
going to go away at some point...
I think we should just do it and not care about what breaks. There has
never been any guarantee about these.
FWIW, "most" other SQL implementations appear to generate column names like
SELECT SUM(reads), SUM(writes) FROM pg_stat_io;
column names: "SUM(reads)", "SUM(writes)"
(various capitalization of course).
We had a colleague look into this a little while ago, and it got pretty
tedious to implement this for all the expression types. And, you know,
the bikeshedding ...
But I'm all in favor of improving this.
