Re: BUG #5974: UNION construct type cast gives poor error message

So I'm a n00b to the open source community, but what needs to happen to get
this fix in?

On 14 April 2011 15:13, Kevin Grittner <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> wrote:

> Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> writes:
>
> >> That means that all three of the databases you tested have
> >> extensions to the standard similar to what is being contemplated
> >> for PostgreSQL.
> >
> > Uh, no, it proves they all extend the standard to allow NULL to be
> > written without an immediate cast. Mike's test really fails to
> > prove anything about the point at hand, which is what data type is
> > being imputed to the inner UNION.
>
> The query run was:
>
> SELECT 1,null,null
> UNION
> SELECT 2,3,null
> UNION
> SELECT 3,null,4
>
> It's a bit of a stretch to think that the columns returned from the
> final union weren't integer, or that integer is the default type of
> the union of two nulls. It's anyone's guess at this point whether
> the third column was unknown during the leftmost union and the type
> set in the next union, or the set of columns involved in the union
> were all evaluated as a group. If they don't have other literals of
> unknown type it may be hard to discern the implementation details,
> but either I've missed something or we're considering similar user
> visible behavior.
>
> > I don't know those other DBMSes well enough to suggest a test that
> > would be definitive on the point, though. We'd need something
> > where the choice of datatype is material to the final visible
> > result, and at least in PG that requires some knowledge of
> > not-very-standard behaviors.
>
> If the implementation details for the other databases are that hard
> to discern, how much do we care *how* they do it? It seems to me
> that the important point here is that they don't throw an error on
> that query and we do.
>
> What am I missing?
>
> -Kevin
>

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Jeff Wu
Marketing Quant, Atlassian
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