Re: Boolean casting in 7.3 -> changed?

On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 04:34 PM, David Walker wrote:

> Does this mean that in the future '342' may not be valid as an insert
> into a
> numeric field and that we should be using 342 instead?

I didn't see an answer to this question, but I sincerely hope that the
answer is
"no." Otherwise, dynamic interfaces are going to have a much harder
time.

Take DBI (and DBD::Pg), for example. Most DBI users don't specify a
data type when using placeholders. Therefore, DBD::Pg (and other DBDs,
including DBD::Oracle) assume that the data types are strings. So it's
not unusual for DBD::Pg to execute a query like this:

INSERT INTO foo (numtype, varchartype, datetime, inttype)
VALUES ('23.4', 'string', '2002-11-30 00:00:00', '12');

In order to allow the flexibility to remain, AFAICT PostgreSQL has to
continue to allow strings to be converted to numbers on the back end.

Regards,

David

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