On 6/17/10 2:03 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote: > On Jun 17, 2010, at 1:50 PM, Josh Berkus wrote: > >>> It isn't. || already does what you're saying. >> So what *does* it do? > > It returns an hstore that's effectively a slice of another hstore. From the > docs (http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/hstore.html):
OK, hammered this out on IRC with several Hstore users, and I think the best answer here is consistency. Both with the other hstore operators and with other set types, such as intarray and ltree. Currently for hstore, %% returns a flattened array and %# returns a two-dimensional array. That means that it makes sense that the operator which returns an hstore subset should be something based on %, either %>, %% or just %. I vote for % . Stuff we discussed and discarded includes: & for two reasons: (a) it looks like a predicate and (b) it's used as "intersect" for intarray and ltree, and we might want to implement intersect for hstore someday. # because it's used as "index" for intarray, and thus should more properly be a synonym for -> in hstore +> because it looks like it ought to be some kind of special incrementor. Using % would also mean that sometime in the future we can implement !% as "elements NOT in this list" (i.e. ' a => 1, b => 2, c => 5' !% 'a, b' == 'c => 5' ) -- -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://www.pgexperts.com -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers