On Tue, Sep  3, 2013 at 09:43:14PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> writes:
> > This has made me adjust my goal and change it so SELECT ROW(NULL) IS
> > NULL returns true, and any further nesting returns false.
> 
> AFAICS, the only good argument for breaking backwards compatibility here
> is if you can convince people that the new behavior is more conformant to
> the SQL spec.  Where's the chapter and verse that argues for this
> interpretation?

The SQL03 standard in section 8.7, table 14, says "degree 1: null" and
"degree > 1: all null".  Does that mean they are considering nested rows
as degree > 1, or is that the number of values in the row? A footnote
says:

        For all R, "R IS NOT NULL" has the same
        result as "NOT R IS NULL" if and only if R is of
        degree 1.

which seems to support the idea that degree is the number of values,
meaning they don't discuss nesting.

> And I will say once more that a patch that affects only the behavior of
> eval_const_expressions can be rejected on its face.  That code has to be
> kept in sync with the behavior of execQual.c, not just whacked around by
> itself.  And then there are the NOT NULL constraint cases to worry about.

I thought execQual.c was already not recursing so I didn't see a need to
change that.

I could not figure out how to test a NOT NULL constraint for nesting.

What is driving my research here is that our current behavior is really
not documentable.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <br...@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

  + It's impossible for everything to be true. +


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