On 02/17/2012 12:59 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> I don't know whether a similar improvement is
>>> possible in this area, but we're certainly not going to get there by
>>> labeling the user's expectations as unreasonable. I don't think they
>>> are, and the people who wrote MySQL and Oracle evidently agree.
>> The people who wrote MySQL had very poor taste in a lot of areas, and
>> we are not going to blindly follow their lead. Oracle is not a terribly
>> presentable system either. Having said that, I don't object to any
>> clean improvements we can think of in this area --- but "make it work
>> more like MySQL" had better not be the only argument for it.
> Hey, if I preferred MySQL to PostgreSQL, I wouldn't be here. That
> doesn't mean that there are exactly 0 things that they do better than
> we do. What I'm unhappy about isn't that we're not bug-compatible
> with MySQL, but rather that, in this case, I like MySQL's behavior
> better, and the fact that they've made it work means it's not
> theoretically impossible. It just involves some trade-off that I
> don't believe we've thought about hard enough.
>
> Standards compliance is a means to an end. The purpose of having
> standards is to allow for interoperable implementations of the same
> underlying functionality. That doesn't mean we should copy
> non-standard warts, of course, but it isn't obvious to me that this is
> a wart. No one has suggested that the user's actual query has more
> than one reasonable interpretation, so complaining that it's ambiguous
> doesn't impress me very much.
Assuming we had the cast, What would "intval like '1%'" mean? You're
going to match 1, 10..19, 100..199, 1000..1999 ...
Now maybe there's a good use for such a test, but I'm have a VERY hard
time imagining what it might be.
cheers
andrew