Peter Eisentraut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Tom Lane wrote: >> That seems OK for SHOW, which is mainly intended for human >> consumption, but what will you do with pg_settings? For programmatic >> use I think we want more predictable behavior.
> I'd think that a program would not care. Or do you want a units-free > display that can be parsed as integer? Yeah. If the value might be shown as either "99kB" or "9MB" then a program *must* have a pretty complete understanding of the units system to make sense of it at all. Furthermore this is not backwards compatible --- it'll break any existing code that inspects pg_settings values. I suggest that the values column should continue to display exactly as it does today (ie, the integer value in the var's native units) and we just add a column saying what the native units are. > Do we want to introduce a difference between pg_settings and SHOW ALL? Yup, I think that's the lesser of the evils. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match