Bonjour Michaël,
Overall, I think that there should be a clearer discussion and plan about
which random functionS postgres should provide to complement the standard
instead of going there… randomly:-)
So, what does the specification tells about seeds, normal and random
functions? A bunch of DBMSs implement RAND, sometimes RANDOM, SEED or
even NORMAL using from time to time specific SQL keywords to do the
work.
I do not have the SQL standard, so I have no idea about what is in there.
From a typical use case point of view, I'd say uniform, normal and
exponential would make sense for floats. I'm also okay with generating a
uniform bytes pseudo-randomly.
I'd be more at ease to add simple functions rather than a special
heavy-on-keywords syntax, even if standard.
Note that SQLValueFunction made the addition of more returning data
types a bit more complicated (not much, still) than the new
COERCE_SQL_SYNTAX by going through a mapping function, so the
keyword/function mapping is straight-forward.
I'm unclear about why this paragraph is here.
--
Fabien.
