Joe Conway <m...@joeconway.com> writes: > On 5/11/21 1:30 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote: >> It just feels like this change makes the function's behavior less >> consistent.
> See Tom's commit message here: > https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=3d0f68dd30612 > In particular: > "The variants of these functions that take > numeric inputs (OIDs or column numbers) are > supposed to return NULL rather than failing > on bad input; this rule reduces problems with > snapshot skew when queries apply the functions > to all rows of a catalog." Yeah, the null-return-for-bad-numeric-input behavior is important. Perhaps a case could be made for returning null for bad text input too, but I don't recall that anybody has asked for that. A case could also be made that changing the behavior on the text side would break applications that expect the current behavior. So I'm disinclined to make a wholesale change there, without more evidence that it's a good idea. regards, tom lane
