On 22.02.23 21:38, Andres Freund wrote:
On 2023-02-20 16:08:00 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
On 11.02.23 20:24, Andres Freund wrote:
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)"
Hm, personally I don't like leaving in parens in the names, that makes it
unnecessarily hard to reference the columns. sum_reads imo is more usable
than than "SUM(reads)".
If you want something without special characters, the example you gave
is manageable, but what are you going to do with
SELECT a, b, a * b, a / b FROM ...
or
SELECT a, b, SUM(a * b) FROM ...
and so on. What would be the actual rule to produce the output you want?
I think a question here is what "usable" means in this context.
If you want a name that you can refer to (in a client API, for example),
you should give it a name explicitly.
I think the uses for the automatic names are that they look pretty and
meaningful in visual output (psql, pgadmin, etc.). In that context, I
think it is ok to use special characters without limitation, since you
are just going to look at the thing, not type it back in.
