On Wed, 2007-11-07 at 16:05 +0100, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote: > On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 02:37:41PM +0000, Simon Riggs wrote: > > Editing an application, you would be required to add the words NULLS > > FIRST to every single ORDER BY and every single CREATE INDEX in an > > application. If we know that is what people would do, why not have one > > parameter to do this for them? > > I find it hard to beleive that every single query in an application > depends on the ordering of NULLs. In fact, I don't think I've even > written a query that depended on a particular way of sorting NULLs. Is > it really that big a deal? True, but how would you know for certain? You'd need to examine each query to be able to tell, which would take even longer. Or would you not bother, catch a few errors in test and then wait for the application to break in random ways when a NULL is added later? I guess that's what most people do, if they do convert. I'd like to remove one difficult barrier to Postgres adoption. We just need some opinions from people who *havent* converted to Postgres, which I admit is difficult cos they're not listening. > > Implement SQLServer and MySQL behaviour? Now we're talking about > > hundreds of new applications that might decide to migrate/support > > PostgreSQL because of our flexibility in being able to support both > > kinds of sorting. > > TBH I think long term is should be attached to each column, as it is a > property of the collation (my COLLATE patch let you specify it per > column). That's a great idea, but orthogonal to the discussion about migrating from other databases. No other database works like that, nor does the SQL standard, but I'll admit its sound thinking otherwise. -- Simon Riggs 2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
