On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 2:46 PM Ondřej Bouda <obo...@email.cz> wrote:
> Hi, > > > 2) Is there any particular reason functions like that aren't built > > into Postgres? They seem like they would be useful. (Or maybe I > > missed them?) > > LEAST() and GREATEST() expressions do the same thing as yours smallest() > and largest(). See > https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-conditional.html > > Ah, thanks very much! I missed those because I didn't see them as functions, and didn't think about expressions. But then going back to my Q3, what is the point of the separate date_larger,int2smaller, etc. functions? Are they faster than least/greatest because they are specific to a particular data type? > Now to be a little more serious, if you want a single function to both > support variadic number of arguments AND all of them in a single array, > how could the function decide whether smallest(ARRAY[1,2,3]) shall > return 1 or ARRAY[1,2,3] (which is the smallest out of all arguments)? > Personally I don't have any use cases where I'd be comparing arrays, and so would be happy to have a single array be treated as a list of elements. But I definitely see your point in more general terms! Thanks again, Ken -- AGENCY Software A Free Software data system By and for non-profits *http://agency-software.org/ <http://agency-software.org/>* *https://demo.agency-software.org/client <https://demo.agency-software.org/client>* ken.tan...@agency-software.org (253) 245-3801 Subscribe to the mailing list <agency-general-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net?body=subscribe> to learn more about AGENCY or follow the discussion.
