On 14 July 2011 06:58, Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@commandprompt.com> wrote: > I don't find the proposed behavior all that suprising, which the > original behavior surely is. I guess the bigger question is whether the > values that timestamptz_part() returns for other cases (than epoch) > should also be different from 0 when an 'infinity' timestamp is passed. > (In other words, why should 0 be the assumed return value here?) >
Well, for example, how do you go about answering the question "what is the day-of-month of the infinite timestamp?" The question is nonsense; it doesn't have a defined day of month, so I think we should be returning NULL or throwing an error. Returning zero is definitely wrong. I think throwing an error is the better way to go, as the user probably didn't intend to ask an incoherent question. It makes sense to special-case 'epoch' because it effectively converts the operation into interval math; if we ask "how many seconds from 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC until the infinite timestamp?" the answer is genuinely "infinite seconds". So +1 for the proposed change for epoch, and let's throw an error for the other date fields instead of returning zero. Cheers, BJ -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
