> I'd be fine with that if we had a system that allows users to pick the
> behavior that they want in their particular environment, but in fact
> our existing system is extremely inflexible. If you start adding
> additional implicit casts to the system, you get failures trying to
> invoke commonly-used system functions, because we've got overloaded
> versions of them precisely to work around the fact that our casting
> rules are more restrictive than real-world users want them to be. If
> that's not prima facie evidence that the system doesn't work well in
> the real world, I'm not sure what would qualify.
They don't even work particularly well for db hackers. I went down the
rabbit hole of trying to make TEXT = CITEXT be a default cast to CITEXT,
and after several days of struggling with breaking system functions, I
gave up.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com