On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 3:15 PM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Steve Haresnape <s.haresn...@creativeintegrity.co.nz> writes: > > As I said, I don't want to quote my identifiers. I know what that does. I > > want to specify them in a certain way, see them in that same way, but > refer > > to them in any old way. > > You can call it normalize or fold or whatever. It's a bad design choice, > > and not even a completely compliant choice. > > > Is a cure contemplated? I know it's not just me that dislikes this. > > No. > > There have been previous discussions of allowing variant case-folding > rules, and the conclusion has always been that it would break so much > stuff as to be entirely not worth the trouble. > > The big problem with making significant semantics changes like this > be optional is that authors of general-purpose tools then have to be > prepared to cope with all the possibilities. That's a pretty enormous > cost to load onto other people. If it *only* affected the core code, > maybe you could find somebody to do the work and call it done, but > actually the implications would reverberate across the entire Postgres > ecosystem. That's a tough call to make for a change that can't even > be painted as meeting a widely-favored goal like better SQL spec > compliance. >
Yeah. I remember the annoyances caused by the removal of the implicit casts in 8.3 and I think this would be orders of magnitude worse. The cast changes were clearly worth the (significant) pain. I seriously doubt changing case folding would. > > Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that the only form > of this idea that people have really spent significant effort looking > at is exactly the fully-SQL-spec-compliant case-folding rule, ie just > like Postgres normally does it except unquoted identifiers fold to > all-upper-case not all-lower. Perhaps there's some reason why what > you want would be less painful than that turns out to be ... but I'm > not seeing such a reason offhand. In fact I suspect your preference > is actually worse, it'd require behavior changes in more places. > As an example, I believe your request would require case-insensitive > uniqueness enforcement in the system catalogs' unique indexes on names. > You have no idea how large a can of worms that opens (but I'll just > mention that "which characters are letters" doesn't even have a well > defined universal answer). > +1 > > regards, tom lane > > -- Best Wishes, Chris Travers Efficito: Hosted Accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in. http://www.efficito.com/learn_more
