Shaun Thomas <sthomas@townnews.com> writes:
> Can anyone explain this to me? Anyone at all? I mean, what logical
> reason is there to leave the database so crippled?
Feel free to step right up and fix it. This is an open-source project.
Whining aside, the reason why these restrictions still exist is that
we have an extensible type system and so we don't really want to put
hard-wired knowledge about different types into the parser or optimizer.
The difficult part is to design a general-purpose, extensible framework
in which these desired conversions can be specified.
There have been prior discussions of how to do this (see the pghackers
archives); but no one's put forward a really satisfactory proposal yet.
If anyone had, it'd probably have been implemented by now --- there
isn't anyone here who likes the current behavior any more than you do.
regards, tom lane