On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >> I don't know whether a similar improvement is >> possible in this area, but we're certainly not going to get there by >> labeling the user's expectations as unreasonable. I don't think they >> are, and the people who wrote MySQL and Oracle evidently agree. > > The people who wrote MySQL had very poor taste in a lot of areas, and > we are not going to blindly follow their lead. Oracle is not a terribly > presentable system either. Having said that, I don't object to any > clean improvements we can think of in this area --- but "make it work > more like MySQL" had better not be the only argument for it.
Hey, if I preferred MySQL to PostgreSQL, I wouldn't be here. That doesn't mean that there are exactly 0 things that they do better than we do. What I'm unhappy about isn't that we're not bug-compatible with MySQL, but rather that, in this case, I like MySQL's behavior better, and the fact that they've made it work means it's not theoretically impossible. It just involves some trade-off that I don't believe we've thought about hard enough. Standards compliance is a means to an end. The purpose of having standards is to allow for interoperable implementations of the same underlying functionality. That doesn't mean we should copy non-standard warts, of course, but it isn't obvious to me that this is a wart. No one has suggested that the user's actual query has more than one reasonable interpretation, so complaining that it's ambiguous doesn't impress me very much. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
