On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 2:46 PM Ondřej Bouda <obouda@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
> 2) Is there any particular reason functions like that aren't built
> into Postgres? They seem like they would be useful. (Or maybe I
> missed them?)
LEAST() and GREATEST() expressions do the same thing as yours smallest()
and largest(). See
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-conditional.html
Ah, thanks very much! I missed those because I didn't see them as functions, and didn't think about expressions.
But then going back to my Q3, what is the point of the separate date_larger,int2smaller, etc. functions? Are they faster than least/greatest because they are specific to a particular data type?
Now to be a little more serious, if you want a single function to both
support variadic number of arguments AND all of them in a single array,
how could the function decide whether smallest(ARRAY[1,2,3]) shall
return 1 or ARRAY[1,2,3] (which is the smallest out of all arguments)?
Personally I don't have any use cases where I'd be comparing arrays, and so would be happy to have a single array be treated as a list of elements. But I definitely see your point in more general terms!
Thanks again,
Ken
AGENCY Software
A Free Software data system
By and for non-profits
(253) 245-3801
learn more about AGENCY or
follow the discussion.
