On Jun 7, 2007, at 15:38 , Fernando Hevia wrote:
Why not? I'm curious if has anything to do with performance or just
style?
Not style. Maybe performance because there's fewer function calls,
but primarily correctness. By using to_char you no longer have a date—
you have a text value—and are relying on the collocation of your
database to compare two text values. This can lead to subtle bugs in
your code. Similarly, I would never use to_char to compare two integers:
SELECT 20 > 9 AS int_values
, to_char(20, '9') > to_char(9, '9') AS text_values;
Is this what you would expect? What's the advantage to using to_char?
Michael Glaesemann
grzm seespotcode net
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TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
