At Teradata, we certainly interpreted the spec to allow case-preserving, but case-insensitive, identifiers. Users really liked it that way: If you re-created a CREATE TABLE statement from the catalog, you could get back exactly the case the user had entered, but people using the table didn't need to worry about case. And column titles in reports would have the nice case preserving information. Sort of like how Windows systems treat file names... The case is preserved, but you don't need to know it to access the file.
I know UNIX users usually think "case-preserving with case-insensitive" a foreign concept, but that doesn't mean the average user feels the same. If I want my column named "WeeklyTotalSales", I really don't want to have to always quote it and type in the exact case. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tom Lane Sent: Monday, October 30, 2006 7:24 PM To: beau hargis Cc: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org; pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org Subject: Re: [HACKERS] [SQL] Case Preservation disregarding case sensitivity? beau hargis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Considering the differences that already exist between database systems and > their varying compliance with SQL and the various extensions that have been > created, I do not consider that the preservation of case for identifiers > would violate any SQL standard. That's not how I read the spec. It is true that we are not 100% spec compliant, but that isn't a good argument for moving further away from spec. Not to mention breaking backwards compatibility with our historical behavior. The change you propose would fix your application at the cost of breaking other people's applications. Perhaps you should consider fixing your app instead. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster