I feel it runs contrary to the purpose of JDBC to make clients have
postgres-specific code for this response. The common JDBC
speccification does not support returning int max (or anything else)
for "I don't know."
It seems unreasonable that this implementation cannot deal with these
trivial cases. I am not sure whether the fault lies with the JDBC
implementation or the underlying RDBMS server, that we cannot
determine that "X" is 1 byte wide, or a||b is (width of a) + (width of
b) bytes wide. Perhaps the requirement to support result metadata did
not percolate down into the server or TCP interface code far enough.
Can someone illuminate us on this?
Best,
David