"Wagner, Kurt" <kurt.wagnerext...@leoni.com> wrote: > when writing a character constant elsewhere > then at first it is interpreted as character constant - right? > then it is casted to the desired type No. It was confusing for me, too; but the PostgreSQL behavior is to treat what the standard calls a <character string literal> as being of type UNKNOWN -- just like the behavior described in the spec for NULL. When it is used in some context where the type must be resolved, it then tries to pick an appropriate type. (I believe there is some slight preference for type TEXT when there are multiple possibilities.) This is helpful for those wanting to use literals of non-standard types. (Many people use PostgreSQL specifically because of the ability to define custom types and operators.) There is an understandable tendency of those who work deep in the guts of the PostgreSQL software, making all this custom type code work, that those coming into PostgreSQL from other environments come with the assumption that these literals will be treated as character strings. From their perspective there is nothing more natural than to view such a literal as lacking any type information, with the obvious implication that you should explicitly give it a type. Once you shake out any problems from code you are migrating, you'll find it's not hard to write new code in a way which will work in either environment. -Kevin
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