Robert Haas [mailto:robertmh...@gmail.com] wrote: > The issue is, rather, that every extension written for > PostgreSQL, whether in or out of core, needs to handle this issue and > every general-purpose client tool (pgAdmin, etc.) needs to be aware of > it. ....
I can see the accuracy of all of the points you make here. And, I definitely had not thought through the side effects on support tools and third party libraries of implementing such modal behavior on the server when I originally asked my question. I did not even understand the ramifications of upper case folding on the server until Tom pointed out the earlier conversations on the subject (in my defense, I was not confused enough to think I had thought through all the effects of a fundamental change to language recognition based on writing one e-mail message). A fully case sensitive mode, leaving the server catalogs all in lower case, which is what we would really like to have for our use, still looks pretty easy to implement on the server. And, it would at least behave consistently with the lower case folding mode if one quoted all identifiers, unlike a case preserving, case insensitive mode. One idea, which would likely be harder to implement on the server, but that would have less impact on third party tools and libraries, would be to configure case folding on a session basis. There would have to be some means to configure a session for the case folding your application wants to see. And, the general default would have to be the current PostgreSQL behavior so that an application that was designed for current behavior would never see a change. While not quite obvious to me how one would implement this for all client environments, it would make such a feature more useful if it included a means to make the configuration outside of the scope of an application itself so that one could give an application over which one has no control the behavior it expects. That is, provide a means to configure a specific application's session default behavior on the client. But, provide no means to configure the server's general default behavior so that the server itself is never modal with respect to case folding. Only the client session is modal. It is pretty easy to see the pain of adding symbol case folding modes. On the other hand, there is no way to know exactly the gain (or loss) in adoption to providing alternate case folding. So, you have one fact (the pain) and one speculation (the gain). I can see that makes deciding whether this is a good or bad idea for the project not at all easy. Anyhow, I appreciate the time you, and others, have taken to explain your thinking and the impacts of adding modal case folding to the server. Ian Lewis (www.mstarlabs.com) -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
