"Ben Tilly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Hopefully this is the right place for a few feature requests that > would address some of the things that I've noticed in postgres. > > 1. Just a minor annoyance, but why must subqueries in FROM clauses > have an alias? For instance suppose that I have an orders table, and > one of the fields is userid. The following is unambiguous and is > legal in Oracle:
Thank you, this is one of my top pet peeves but when I proposed changing it I was told nobody's complained. Now we have at least one user complaint, any others out there? > 2. Why is 'non-integer constant in GROUP BY' an error? Hm... I was a bit surprised by this warning myself. IIRC there was an implementation convenience issue. > 3. How hard would it be to have postgres ignore aliases in group by > clauses? That sounds like a strange idea. > 4) Items 2 and 3 would both be made irrelevant if postgres did > something that I'd really, really would like. Which is to assume that > a query without a group by clause, but with an aggregate function in > the select, should have an implicit group by clause where you group by > all non-aggregate functions in the select. > > For example > > SELECT foo, count(*) > FROM bar > > would be processed as: > > SELECT foo, count(*) > FROM bar > GROUP BY foo I agree this would be convenient but it seems too scary to actually go anywhere. What would you group by in the case of: SELECT a+b, count(*) FROM bar Should it group by a,b or a+b ? Also, this might be a bit shocking for MySQL users who are accustomed to MySQL's non-standard extension for the same syntax. There it's treated as an assertion that the columns are equal for all records in a group or at least that it doesn't matter which such value is returned, effectively equivalent to our DISTINCT ON feature. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
