Re: Empty arrays vs. NULLs, 9.1 & 8.3

Ken Tanzer <ken(dot)tanzer(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Thanks Steve. FWIW I looked at the 9.0 and 9.1 release notes, and didn't
> find much on arrays in them.

This particular issue was fixed in 8.4.

> I do have one follow-up curiosity question, though. Why does
> array_dims(array[]::varchar[]) return NULL instead of 0? I would expect
> NULL for a NULL array, but not an empty one. (And the same for
> array_[upper,lower,length] functions as well.

Yeah, there are still a lot of inconsistencies there :-(. Eventually
I'd like to see somebody go through all the array operations and make
a proposal for consistent handling of empty arrays. I think it would
be better if we changed all those things at once, rather than causing
piecemeal compatibility hits.

regards, tom lane