Tom Lane wrote:
"Greg Stark" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But of course case insensitivity isn't going to fix that example for you.
So we're right back at the question of where we should draw the line in
trying to accept variant input.

Well it's not a perfect precedent but for example, dd accepts:

G    (2^30)
M    (2^20)
k     (2^10)
K    (2^10)
Kb  (10^3)
MB (10^6)
GB (10^9)
b    (512)

Hmm.  I could get behind a proposal to allow single-letter abbreviations
if it could be made to work across the board,

The SQL standard actually specifies something about that. You can define the length of large object types (CLOB and BLOB) with multipliers K, M, and G, as in

CREATE TABLE foo ( bar BLOB(5 M) );

These multipliers are case insensitive, of course. (And their are 1024-based, FWIW.)

So I could imagine that we generalize this approach to make these multipliers available in other positions.

This would have definitional problems of its own, however. If you interpret K, M, and G strictly as unit-less multipliers, then

SET shared_buffers = 2 G

would mean

SET shared_buffers = 2 * 1073741824

meaning

SET shared_buffers = 2147463648

which is not the same thing as the current

SET shared_buffer = '2GB'

This also affects the solution to another GUC units complaint that the quotes are annoying, which I support.

We could possibly settle some of these arguments if we could redefine all memory parameters to use one byte as base unit, and then allow some ambiguity and unit omission from there. But that would probably cause much havoc, so we are stuck with a certain degree of inconsistency anyhow.

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