2013/1/23 Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us>: > Pavel Stehule <pavel.steh...@gmail.com> writes: >> next related example > >> CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.myleast(VARIADIC integer[]) >> RETURNS integer >> LANGUAGE sql >> AS $function$ >> select min(v) from unnest($1) g(v) >> $function$ > > The reason you get a null from that is that (1) unnest() produces zero > rows out for either a null or empty-array input, and (2) min() over > zero rows produces NULL. > > In a lot of cases, it's not very sane for aggregates over no rows to > produce NULL; the best-known example is that SUM() produces NULL, when > anyone who'd not suffered brain-damage from sitting on the SQL committee > would have made it return zero. So I'm not very comfortable with > generalizing from this specific case to decide that NULL is the > universally right result. >
I am testing some situation and there are no consistent idea - can we talk just only about functions concat and concat_ws? these functions are really specific - now we talk about corner use case and strongly PostgreSQL proprietary solution. So any solution should not too bad. Difference between all solution will by maximally +/- 4 simple rows per any function. Possibilities 1) A. concat(variadic NULL) => empty string, B. concat(variadic '{}') => empty string -- if we accept @A, then B is ok 2) A. concat(variadic NULL) => NULL, B. concat(variadic '{}') => NULL -- question - is @B valid ? 3) A. concat(variadic NULL) => NULL, B. concat(variadic '{}) => empty string There are no other possibility. I can live with any variant - probably we find any precedent to any variant in our code or in ANSI SQL. I like @2 as general concept for PostgreSQL variadic functions, but when we talk about concat() and concat_ws() @1 is valid too. Please, can somebody say his opinion early Regards Pavel > regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers