Re: Potential bug in postgres 8.2.4

Tomas Doran <bobtfish(at)bobtfish(dot)net> writes:
> The tightening in general is biting me, but if the answer was 'it was
> deliberate tightening', and the behavior was consistent, then we'd
> have just dealt with it - it's the in-consistent behavior that makes
> me think this is a bug (or at least a gotcha, as it's not what you
> expect)...

The direction of the future is that *all* those queries are going to
fail, because they're relying on an implicit integer-to-text conversion,
and its days are numbered. That might happen as soon as 8.3:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-04/msg00017.php
but it's been on the radar screen for a very long time, eg
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2001-10/msg00108.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2002-04/msg00450.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-sql/2004-01/msg00064.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2005-11/msg00510.php

I think the reason this particular behavior changed in 8.2 is the
re-implementation of multi-element IN tests as ScalarArrayOps;
but it's part of an intentional long-term tightening of SQL semantics,
and you're not going to get far with a proposal to revert it.
Fix your code.

regards, tom lane