Hello,

MySQL 4.1 and Oracle 10g do the cast automatically, so I think the behavior should be changed if the SQL standards require it in this case. In general, it is confusing for programmers that 'years' has type unknown, 0 is integer, 0.5 is numeric, true is boolean, etc. Also I can imagine that it makes sense to perform an automatic cast for the "=" operator.

My query is normally a bit bigger:
A birthday field is mapped to a iCalendar dataset in a subquery. In most applications this subquery would be declared as a view.

select id,subject,begin,ending,duration,allday,recurrence,repeatinterval,repeatcount,repeatuntil,repeatexcludes,until,folder,created,lastmodified,createdby,lastmodifiedby from (select b.*,('Birthday: '||firstname||' '||lastname||' '||company) as subject,86399 as duration, 0 as repeatuntil,birthday as begin,(birthday+86399) as ending,1 as allday,cast('years' as char) as recurrence, 0 as until,1 as repeatinterval,0 as repeatcount,'' as repeatexcludes,0 as repeatbegin, 365 as repeatend from simple_contacts b where birthday!=0 ) p where ...

bye
Thomas


Tom Lane wrote:
"Thomas" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
select * from (select 'years' as recurrence) p where recurrence = 'years'
it gives:
ERROR: failed to find conversion function from "unknown" to text

Try casting the unknown value to some specific type, eg

regression=# select * from (select 'years'::text as recurrence) p where 
recurrence = 'years';
 recurrence
------------
 years
(1 row)

Do you have a less artificial example where not resolving the
subselect's output type is a problem?  We could change it to
force the type to text sooner, but I'm afraid that that would
break other people's usages.

                        regards, tom lane



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