Re: Negative LIMIT and OFFSET?

From: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
To: Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Andrew Sullivan <ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Negative LIMIT and OFFSET?
Date: 2007-12-14 14:41:49
Message-ID: 1197643309.15521.116.camel@ebony.site
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On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 22:23 -0800, Neil Conway wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 22:06 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > I guess that on purely philosophical grounds, it's not an unreasonable
> > behavior. For example, "LIMIT n" means "output at most n tuples",
> > not "output exactly n tuples". So when it outputs no tuples in the face
> > of a negative limit, it's meeting its spec.
>
> If "LIMIT n" means "emit at most n tuples", then a query that produces 0
> rows with n < 0 is arguably violating its spec, since it has produced
> more tuples than the LIMIT specified (0 > n). Interpreted this way, no
> result set can be consistent with a negative limit, so I'd vote for
> throwing an error.

I even found an existing, unused error message called
ERRCODE_INVALID_LIMIT_VALUE

so here's a patch.

--
Simon Riggs
2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com

Attachment Content-Type Size
error_if_negative.v1.patch text/x-patch 1.5 KB

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