All of the arguments against my proposed changes are basically of the form that "this is not what the SQL standard says". They are theoretical arguments based on a world-view that holds that strong-typing is good and that it is the duty of database systems to enforce types.
I do not hold to that world view. SQLite seeks a better way. You may or may not agree that the SQLite way is better (I happen to think that it is, of course) but that is beside the point. What I want to know is whether or not my proposed changes will cause serious hardship to any current or future SQLite users. Please let me restate the proposed change: I desire to change SQLite so that it no longer distinguishes between integer and real. The two concepts are merged into a unified "numeric" type. Just as the same string can be represented as either UTF-8 or UTF-16 (or sometimes ISO-8859) so too can a number be represented as integer or real. But regardless of the particular representation chosen at any particular moment, the "type" of the data is always "numeric". There is no "integer". There is no "real". There is only "numeric". And because all number values are of the same type, they need to always be treated in the same way. A division should return a result that includes the fractional part, if there is one, regardless of the particular representation of the operands. This a simplification designed to make your life easier. No longer are there different rules to apply depending on whether a value or a column is "integer" or "real". Everything always works the same way. The goal is to have no special cases. I'm trying do all this while at the same time maintaining reasonable compatibility with other SQL database engines. SQLite will never be 100% compatible with other database engines. But on the other hand, I dare say you cannot find any two other SQL database engines that are 100% compatible with each other. Most claim SQL compatibility, but you can always find a corner case where two different engines will give divergent results. So even though SQLite is not 100% compatible, neither is any other database engine. With the above clarification, I will restate the question: Suppose SQLite were to merge "integer" and "real" into a single datatype "numeric" that always worked the same way. Does anybody know of a (real) usage example where this would cause an actual hardship on developers? Are there any examples of things that you can do with separate "real" and "integer" types that you cannot do with a unified "numeric" type? -- D. Richard Hipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
