On Thu, Jan 5, 2023 at 12:42 PM David G. Johnston <david.g.johns...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The VALUES subquery has to produce its tabular output without being aware of > how the outer query is going to use it. The second column of your values > subquery lacks type information so the system chooses a default - text. > > Dealing with types is one of the harder medium-hard problems in computer > science…encountering this problem in real life has never seen me motivated > enough to gripe about it rather than just add an explicit cast and move on. > And I’ve been around long enough to know that the project is, and long has > been, aware of the dull pain points in this area. > being here for quite a few years now I agree. It's tempting to trying to fix a problem in this area since it seems the fix is simple but it is hard to realize the wider impact that simple fix has. Still let me try to propose something :) we cast a quoted value to UNKNOWN type, but this is a special value null which can be casted to any SQL data type. Probably we could add a ANYNULLTYPE or some such generic null type which can be casted to any data type. Then a null value without any type is labeled as ANYNULLTYPE if specific type information is not available. This problem wouldn't arise then. Of course that's a lot of code to fix seemingly rare problem so may not be worth it still. -- Best Wishes, Ashutosh Bapat
