Re: Cause of intermittent rangetypes regression test failures

Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com> writes:
> On Sun, 2011-11-13 at 15:38 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I think this demonstrates that the current definition of range_before is
>> broken. It is not reasonable for it to throw an error on a perfectly
>> valid input ... at least, not unless you'd like to mark it VOLATILE so
>> that the planner will not risk calling it.
>>
>> What shall we have it do instead?

> We could have it return NULL, I suppose. I was worried that that would
> lead to confusion between NULL and the empty range, but it might be
> better than marking it VOLATILE.

It needs to return FALSE, actually. After further reading I realized
that you have that behavior hard-wired into the range GiST routines,
and it's silly to make the stand-alone versions of the function act
differently.

This doesn't seem terribly unreasonable: we just have to document
that the empty range is neither before nor after any other range.

regards, tom lane