Jim Nasby wrote:
On Nov 14, 2006, at 2:42 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:
On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 10:51 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
"Simon Riggs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
We have namespaces to differentiate between two sources of object
names,
so anybody who creates a schema where MyColumn is not the same
thing as
myColumn is not following sensible rules for conceptual distance.
I'd agree that that is not a good design practice, but the fact remains
that they *are* different per spec.
Would be better to make this behaviour a userset
switchable between the exactly compliant and the more intuitive.
That's certainly not happening --- if you make any changes in the
semantics of equality of type name, it would have to be frozen no
later than initdb time, for exactly the same reasons we freeze
locale then (hint: index ordering).
[Re-read all of this after Bruce's post got me thinking.]
My summary of the thread, with TODO items noted:
1. PostgreSQL doesn't follow the spec, but almost does, with regard to
comparison of unquoted and quoted identifiers. DB2 does this per spec.
2. TODO: We could follow the spec, but it would need an initdb option;
some non-SQL:2003 standard PostgreSQL programs would not work as they do
now. This is considered a minor, low priority item, though.
3. TODO: We could set column headers better if we wanted to (rather
than ?column? we could use e.g. Sum_ColumnName etc)
Did the idea of preserving the original case and using that for output
column names, /d, etc. get shot down? I thought it would be a useful
addition...
I think there is broad agreement that we need to provide optional
minimally spec compliant behaviour (fold unquoted to upper case,
otherwise as now). I am not sure how invasive either the "case preserved
+ case insensitive comparison" or the "case preserved + case sensitive
comparison" option would be. I don't know that anything has been ruled
out. Until someone produces a patch or a definite design and analysis we
are a bit in the dark. Personally, I would like to see all of these as
options ;-)
I think Simon's item 3 above is a separate issue.
cheers
andrew
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