Re: Why Not MySQL?

> I fully understand that you guys have your own set of priorities. I also
> appreciate the work you guys have put into making postgres into a database
> I want to use. Having said all that I did wait 4 to 5 days without a reply
> of any sort. It would have been perfectly fine for somebody to say "It's not
> possible don't waste your time", "Don't ask this question here", "we are
> really entirely too busy to deal with this" or even "go away and don't ever
> bother us ever again".

Well, none of those things are true, and it is rare that someone would
speak for a group this widely distributed to say "we are too busy". In
most cases, when the usual suspects are too busy someone else will
post an answer to a question, and you are never likely to get a
definitive "I'm too busy and everyone else is too".

At some point, someone may have time to answer *exactly* the questions
you asked. Another strategy to try after the first one failed is to
come in with the more detailed problem statement, asking for
suggestions on a solution. Particularly if you can phrase it so it is
clear that it may solve problems for a larger class of user than the
one who managed to grow a M$ Access app to 300 tables and 1400 queries
before deciding that Access might be a little light in performance to
be suitable. But that's water under the bridge, eh?

Anyway, so the larger class of problem is for the Sybase/M$ user who
relies on case insensitive queries (which *are* available in Postgres)
which are indistinguishable from the SQL92-mandated case-sensitive
ones. So we might explore the possibilities for a contrib/ module
which does this, though because it touches on replacing existing
backend code it may not quite fly since there are some function lookup
optimizations which may keep you from overwriting the existing
routines. But it would be a neat capability to have; I wonder if it
would work right away or if we could tweak the backend to allow this
in the future??

Of course the alternative is to just dive in and hack and slash at the
backend code. Look in parser/gram.y and utils/adt/like.c for
starters...

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu
South Pasadena, California