Re: ORDER BY 1 COLLATE

On 04/18/2011 04:20 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut<peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
>> This came from a review by Noah Misch a great while ago:
>> test=> SELECT b FROM foo ORDER BY 1 COLLATE "C";
>> ERROR: 42804: collations are not supported by type integer
>> According to SQL92, this should be supported. Do we want to bother? It
>> doesn't look hard to fix, so it's really only a question of whether this
>> would be useful, or its absence would be too confusing.
> The ORDER BY 1 business seems to me to be legacy anyway. I'm not
> inclined to put in even more hacks to make strange combinations work
> there --- I think we're likely to find ourselves painted into a corner
> someday as it is.
>
>

It's likely to be used by SQL generators if nothing else, and I've been
known to use it as a very convenient shorthand. It would seem to me like
quite a strange inconsistency to allow order by n with some qualifiers
but not others.

cheers

andrew