On Thu, 21 May 2015 13:57:24 -0400 Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Bill Moran <wmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > My other question: is there a specific reason why PostgreSQL doesn't support > > this syntax, aside from "nobody has bothered to add such support"? Because > > I'm considering writing a patch to Postgres and submitting it, but I'm not > > going to go down that path if there's a specific reason why supporting this > > syntax would be _bad_. Personally, I feel like it would be a good thing, as > > it seems like a lot of other database systems support it, and even though > > it's not ANSI, it's pretty much the de-facto standard. > > How many is "a lot", and do any of the responsible vendors sit on the SQL > standards committee? Well, I've personally worked with (in addition to PostgreSQL) Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Sybase -- PostgreSQL is the only one of those 4 that doesn't support the 0xff syntax. I did a litle research and it appears that neither Oracle nor db2 supports the 0xff syntax ... so not _quite_ as common as it seemed to me. > One large concern about doing anything like this is whether future > versions of the SQL standard might blindside us with some > not-terribly-compatible interpretation of that syntax. If we do something > that is also in Oracle or DB2 or one of the other big boys, then we can > probably rely on the assumption that they'll block anything really > incompatible from becoming standardized ;-). I assume that Microsoft is big enough to prevent anything that would hurt SQL Server's compatibility from becomming a standard? > OTOH, if the actual meaning of "a lot" is "MySQL", I'd be pretty worried > about this scenario. Well, MySQL _does_ support that syntax ... but I couldn't care less. MySQL also throws away your data instead of giving you errors and I would never ask PostgreSQL to start behaving like that. With all that being said, if I were to build a patch, would it be likely to be accepted into core? -- Bill Moran -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
