Hi, PostgreSQL's grammer allows you to specify the operator to sort with in the ORDER BY clause. Various bits of the backend support this feature, yet it appears to partially undocumented. I can't find it in the ORDER BY [1] section but there is a paragraph on it under the SELECT documentation [2].
I'm asking because SQL COLLATE support is really doing something similar. I was wondering if instead of adding something in parallel just replace sortop with collateid. This means all the code relating to pathkeys won't need to change since we still use OIDs for the pathkeys, they're just not operator oids anymore. We can continue to support USING [op] as long as [op] is one of the GT or LT operators in the OPERATOR CLASS. This restriction may exist already, I can't tell. All we lose is the ability to say USING [arbitrary op]. Does anybody use this. Would people object to requiring the operator after USING to be part of an operator class? Have a nice day, [1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/queries-order.html [2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/sql-select.html -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a > tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone > else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.
pgp7TMawPFCRG.pgp
Description: PGP signature
