On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 13:50 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > Currently, the constructs > '{}'::arraytype > ARRAY[]::arraytype > return zero-dimensional arrays, as does the underlying function > construct_empty_array(). I can't immediately find any way at SQL > level to produce an empty array with one or more dimensions. > However, construct_array and construct_md_array will happily build > zero-length arrays of dimension 1 or higher, leading to weirdnesses > such as illustrated here: > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2008-10/msg00915.php > > Seems like we ought to clean this up. I'm not sure which way to jump > though: should we decree that arrays of no elements must always have > zero dimensions, or should we get rid of that and standardize on, say, > 1-D array with lower bound 1 and upper bound 0? > > A somewhat related issue that I noticed while poking at this is that > array_dims() returns NULL for a zero-dimension array. That seems a bit > bogus too; wouldn't an empty string be saner? Of course the issue > goes away if we get rid of zero-dimension arrays.
Please remove zero-dimension arrays. The number of dimensions of an empty array really ought to be NULL, or if we fix it to be non-NULL then 1+. Zero just makes a weird case for no reason. An empty string only makes sense in the context of that particular function, it doesn't really help with other maths. -- Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers