Simon Riggs wrote:
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.
May I, as an outsider, comment? :) I really think of ASC NULLS FIRST
(and DESC NULLS LAST) as the way to go. Imagine a last_login column that
sorts users that have not logged in as the most recently logged in,
which is not very intuitive. I vote for sort_nulls_first defaulting to
false in order not to break bc.
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