Re: Assignment of valid collation for SET operations on queries with UNKNOWN types.

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 1:30 PM, Ashutosh Bapat
<ashutosh(dot)bapat(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 8:18 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Ashutosh Bapat <ashutosh(dot)bapat(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>>> The way this patch has been written, it doesn't allow creating tables
>>> with unknown type columns, which was allowed earlier.
>>
>> Yes, that's an intentional change; creating such tables (or views) has
>> never been anything but a foot-gun.
>>
>> However, I thought the idea was to silently coerce affected columns from
>> unknown to text. This doesn't look like the behavior we want:
>
> Do you mean to say that when creating a table with a column of unknown
> type, that column type should be silently converted (there's nothing
> to coerce when the table is being created) to text? instead of
> throwing an error?

FWIW that's what I understood: the patch should switch unknown columns
to text. A bunch of side effects when converting types are avoided
this way.
--
Michael