On Thu, 21 May 2015 13:57:24 -0400
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> writes:
> > My other question: is there a specific reason why PostgreSQL doesn't support
> > this syntax, aside from "nobody has bothered to add such support"? Because
> > I'm considering writing a patch to Postgres and submitting it, but I'm not
> > going to go down that path if there's a specific reason why supporting this
> > syntax would be _bad_. Personally, I feel like it would be a good thing, as
> > it seems like a lot of other database systems support it, and even though
> > it's not ANSI, it's pretty much the de-facto standard.
>
> How many is "a lot", and do any of the responsible vendors sit on the SQL
> standards committee?
Well, I've personally worked with (in addition to PostgreSQL) Microsoft
SQL Server, MySQL, and Sybase -- PostgreSQL is the only one of those 4 that
doesn't support the 0xff syntax.
I did a litle research and it appears that neither Oracle nor db2 supports
the 0xff syntax ... so not _quite_ as common as it seemed to me.
> One large concern about doing anything like this is whether future
> versions of the SQL standard might blindside us with some
> not-terribly-compatible interpretation of that syntax. If we do something
> that is also in Oracle or DB2 or one of the other big boys, then we can
> probably rely on the assumption that they'll block anything really
> incompatible from becoming standardized ;-).
I assume that Microsoft is big enough to prevent anything that would
hurt SQL Server's compatibility from becomming a standard?
> OTOH, if the actual meaning of "a lot" is "MySQL", I'd be pretty worried
> about this scenario.
Well, MySQL _does_ support that syntax ... but I couldn't care less. MySQL
also throws away your data instead of giving you errors and I would never
ask PostgreSQL to start behaving like that.
With all that being said, if I were to build a patch, would it be likely
to be accepted into core?
--
Bill Moran