On 2/26/06, Karsten Hilbert <Karsten.Hilbert@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Please help. how? is there any place where postgres' SQL:2003 incompatibilities are being discussed? I really want to have standard-compatible PostgreSQL and some option in postgresql.conf that would allow me to restrict Postgres' SQL syntax to standard. The suggestion 'to feel free and use only standard queries' is the bad thing, because: a. the papers of SQL:2003 are quite hard to understand, even for good specialist (the main part, #2 has more than 1300 pages!) b. what about novices? it's almost impossible to go the right way for them. PostgreSQL has very-very good documentation, but it teaches to go Pg's way, which is not right in that sense, unfortunately... Now we have a lot of incompatibilities. I would classify them: 1. 'Extending' features - things that offer the same abilities that standard constructions. Some of these things allow to use shorter syntax, but I really think that many of them are just 'heritage of the past'. Yes, standard is 'talkative', but I prefer only standard things, because it helps me to understand other databases and 'academical things'. Actually, I hate ':=', '::', 'INT2', etc, and really want to be able to deprecate them (via conf or something) 2. Features that are implemented in non-standard way (ot things that are not yet implemented but could be considered as basic...) The good examples are: ILIKE and lack of ability to set up collation (rules for string comparison); lack of NULLS FIRST / LAST construction and necessity to add additional ordering step to ORDER BY instead of that. 3. 'Ugly' things like DISTINCT ON expression [, ...] (see http://chernowiki.ru/index.php?node=38#A13) Maybe to create a sub-project (or special section in TODO) for improving SQL:2003 compatibility? I've encountered with many 'reefs' during migration from MS SQL to Postgres. Some of them are here: http://chernowiki.ru. I do think that such drawbacks complicate migration for other DBMSs' guys and understanding SQL for newbies. -- Best regards, Nikolay
