It's good to hear this kind of discussion going on!
I solved my problem (for now) by creating a bunch of
overloaded LEAST and GREATEST functions, one for each
datatype. They only take two parameters, but that's
fine for what we're doing.
However, I ran into another, unrelated problem. I
created the LEAST and GREATEST functions as described
above, but when I tried to perform an update statement
comparing two timestamps, I ran into a problem:
UPDATE foo
SET my_timestamp_field =
LEAST(my_timestamp_field,
TO_TIMESTAMP('2003-07-01 12:34:56',
'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS'))
WHERE ...
My LEAST function would not work because
my_timestamp_field has a datatype of "timestamp
without time zone", and the TO_TIMESTAMP(...) creates
a "timestamp *with* time zone". I could not find
anything in the documentation about this behavior. I
am running v7.3.2.
All help is appreciated, and please keep up the
discussion about the ability to create functions with
variable number of arguments (LEAST, GREATEST, etc.).
I could see the potential for wanting to write these
in the future.
Cheers,
-Stefan
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