Re: PostgreSQL Gotchas

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org>
Cc: Jan Wieck <JanWieck(at)Yahoo(dot)com>, Chris Travers <chris(at)travelamericas(dot)com>, Scott Marlowe <smarlowe(at)g2switchworks(dot)com>, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net>, "Aly S(dot)P Dharshi" <aly(dot)dharshi(at)telus(dot)net>, "Gavin M(dot) Roy" <gmr(at)ehpg(dot)net>, pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: PostgreSQL Gotchas
Date: 2005-10-15 15:43:04
Message-ID: 29678.1129390984@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> writes:
> The main problem I see is that the most people who are complaining are
> people who create their tables as "MixedCaseQuoted" and then refer to
> them as Unquoted. Even following the SQL standard precisely will not
> fix this, given that behaviour is non-standard also.

> Seems to me we'd be better off creating an option
> "lowercase_quoted_anyway" which solves everything, at the expense of
> being even less compliant.

Hmm. That solves the problem for people who are used to MySQL or Access
or whatever it is that behaves like that, but that problem hasn't really
been on the radar screen that I've noticed. The push-back I've been
paying attention to is from people who say "this application expects the
standard-mandated behavior, why aren't you following the standard?"

Although ... it's true that there seem to be very few apps relying on
case sensitivity per se, ie, expecting "Foo" and "foo" to be different.
The complaints that I can remember were about programs that expected
"FOO" and FOO (not quoted) to be the same. So always-smash-to-lower-
case might indeed solve most of the real-world problem for the Oracle
camp as well.

Comments anyone?

regards, tom lane

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