Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Why couldn't an RDBMS such as postgres interpret a SELECT that omits the GROUP > BY as implicitly grouping by all the columns that aren't part of an aggregate? Per SQL standard, a SELECT with aggregates but no GROUP BY is supposed to give exactly one row. What you suggest would not do that. In general we're not that much into assigning made-up semantics to cases that are specifically disallowed by the spec. It's usually not too obvious what the result "should be", so we run the risk that the SQL committee might someday make a contrary decision. More, this would lose error detection, and reduce interoperability with other DBMSes that follow the spec more faithfully. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
