Re: [HACKERS] indexes and floats

> Imho, queries must return
> consistent set of data: if I want to get rows inserted 5 days
> ago and run query with WHERE insert_date = now() - 5 near 12PM
> then I risk to get inconsistent set of rows if now() will be
> evaluated for EACH tuple.

This is perhaps a bad example, because now() (and 'now') return the
transaction time, guaranteed to be the same for each row evaluation of a
query, and the same for every query within a transaction.

What should be behavior of

  update x set i = random();

be? I would have assumed that random() is evaluated once; are there any
truely volatile functions in SQL92?

> > Also, perhaps instead of doing constant folding in the parser,
> > consider making it part of rewrite. This pass would just traverse
> > the tree looking for functions with constant arguements and would
> > pre-evaluate them and and save the result in the wherever the
> > cacheable results would be stored. No special case required except
> > that the optimizer would have to notice that a pre-computed result
> > was available to use as a key value.
> This is bad for performance.

What makes this bad for performance? An extra traversal of the parse
tree? Or something else??

                      - Tom