Re: Bug in ILIKE?

Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>
>> The docs actually don't state what are the semantics of escape followed
>> by something that is not escape or a metachar. Does the spec say
>> anything about that?
>>
>
> The spec says it's an error, per the SQL92 excerpt I quoted in the
> previous thread. (SQL99 says about the same with more notation;
> I didn't bother looking in the later specs.)
>
> I find that position too restrictive, mainly because of this
> consideration: suppose some future version of the spec invents
> additional metacharacters. To be concrete, suppose ? means
> something special in SQL2010. Now how do you make a pattern that
> works in both older and newer servers? \? means literal ? to the
> newer server, but if it throws an error on the older, you're stuck.
>
> So I'm for the definition that escape-anything means exactly anything,
> without any special treatment that it would otherwise have. And in
> the case of ILIKE it seems like "no special treatment" should mean
> "case insensitive match".
>

Well, it looks to me to be pretty easily fixable. Given the above it
seems to me marginal to call it a bug, though. I don't have very strong
feelings, but I am generally opposed to changing the visible behaviour
in stable releases unless something is clearly a bug.

cheers

andrew
> regards, tom lane
>
>