On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 14:07 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> And we not only don't give them the behavior they want; we
> don't even have a meaningful way to give the option of opting into
> that behavior at initdb or create-database time.
I strongly object to offering options that change the language in such a
substantial way. initdb-time options still mean that we are essentially
dividing our language, and therefore the applications that support
postgres, in half (or worse). One of the things I really like about
postgres is that we haven't forked the language with a million options
like mysql has. I don't even like the fact that we have a GUC to control
the output format of a BYTEA.
For every developer who says "wow, that mysql query just worked without
modification" there is another one who says "oh, I forgot to test with
option XYZ... postgres is too complex to support, I'm going to drop it
from the list of supported databases".
I still don't see a compelling reason why opting out of overloading on a
per-function basis won't work. Your objections seemed fairly minor in
comparison to how strongly you are advocating this use case.
In particular, I didn't get a response to:
http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/1354055056.1766.50.camel@sussancws0025
For what it's worth, I'm glad that people like you are pushing on these
usability issues, because it can be hard for insiders to see them
sometimes.
Regards,Jeff Davis