Ken Johanson wrote: > Alvaro Herrera wrote: >> If you are arguing that the spec's definition of the CHARACTER type is >> not really very useful, I think you are going to find a lot of >> supporters. You can send your complaints to the SQL committee; but >> then, it is unlikely that this is going to change anytime soon because >> of the fear of breaking backwards compatibility. > > Agreed. There may be allot of users who in the case of CAST, need to > extract the leftmost digit, and for those database and their users that > do this by default, it would cause harm. Right. And those that don't need that are certainly using a cast to CHARACTER VARYING. -- Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/ PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match