Re: Difficulties Storing Case Sensitive DDL Definitions

On 11/15/05 4:42 PM, "Lane Van Ingen" <lvaningen(at)esncc(dot)com> wrote:

> We are in the process of converting a legacy application to PostgreSQL,
> using Windows 2003, version 8.0.1.
>
> We have been noticing (via pgAdmin) that when we create a view, PostgreSQL
> appears to 'flatten' all of our DDL statements to lowercase. Because the
> legacy code is messy and undocumented, and because it uses names that are a
> mixture of uppercase and lowercase, we felt it would be a better to create a
> separate schema with views of the same name as the tables we are converting,
> and use the view to return rows to the app that have the mixture of upper-
> and lowercase letters it desires.
>
> For instance, here is a field that we tried to create in a view:
> as input by our CREATE VIEW statements : updatedTime
> as stored in PostgreSQL, and viewed by pgAdmin : updatedtime
> The application is issuing a query statement that wants 'updatedTime', like
> this:
> select updatedTime from <table> ....
>
> In order to overcome this, we created our views like this:
> CREATE VIEW <view_name> AS SELECT
> updatedTime AS "updatedTime",
> :
> (etc.)
>
> When trying to query it (via pgAdmin and other tools), we found we had to
> quote the field names to avoid syntax errors, like this
> select "updatedTime" from <table> ....
> This means we have to go back and change all queries in the legacy
> application if we use this approach, which is exactly what we were hoping to
> avoid.
>
> QUESTION: Is there any way around this behaviour of 'flattening' the case of
> schema objects? Don't see any config parms or run-time options that seem to
> apply.

You need to use quotes EVERYWHERE if you want to have a mixture of uppercase
and lowercase. Otherwise, you can just use lowercase and have everything
case-folded. So, as far as I know, there is no such configuration option.

Sean