Re: [HACKERS] Minor bug: inconsistent handling of overlength names

On Sun, 26 Jul 1998, Tom Lane wrote:

> DROP INDEX fails on overlength table names:
>
> tgl=> CREATE UNIQUE INDEX MarketOrderHistory_sequenceNo_Index
> tgl-> ON MarketOrderHistory USING btree (sequenceNo);
> CREATE
> tgl=> DROP INDEX MarketOrderHistory_sequenceNo_Index;
> ERROR: pg_ownercheck: class "marketorderhistory_sequenceno_index" not found
> tgl=> DROP INDEX MarketOrderHistory_sequenceNo_I;
> DROP
>
> Evidently DROP INDEX is using a second-rate way of reducing the given
> name to canonical form for comparisons.
>
> Some further experimentation shows that CREATE TABLE won't let you
> create a relation name >= 32 characters in the first place. So there's
> some inconsistency about what's done with overlength names.
>
> It seems to me that we ought to have consistent treatment of long names,
> and the treatment I like is the one that CREATE INDEX is using:
> silently truncate the given name to what we can handle, and accept
> it as long as the truncated form is unique. This is the time-honored
> way of handling overlength names in compilers, and it works well.

Same thing goes for user-names. I recently created a user named (for the
sake of example) '1234567890', using CREATE USER. No complaints here, but
trying to connect with user '1234567890' fails. You can connect with
'12345678'.

Maarten

_____________________________________________________________________________
| TU Delft, The Netherlands, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems |
| Department of Electrical Engineering |
| Computer Architecture and Digital Technique section |
| M(dot)Boekhold(at)et(dot)tudelft(dot)nl |
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