> > Otherwise, you must enlighten me on how it could have a practical use > > to have an arbitrary value in the group returned together with the > > total number of records across all the groups. > > It's not useful in your specific query, but it is useful in others. Yours is not the > only system in the world that uses SQLite, you know. >
Igor, I did not mean to belittle SQLite (or the very good work that you are doing on this e-mail list). In fact, I think it is a fantastic tool which can be used for many purposes. When I write as I do, it is after weighing the advantage of this "feature" against the disadvantages. As for the advantages, I just don't see how it could be practical to have an arbitrary group value together with the total number of records in an application. But sometimes a feature / error that was not intended finds its way into an application and so it is still supported in later versions. I guess it could be so. Or perhaps it can be useful in applications of a different type than I have been involved in. On the downside I often see mistakes of left out elements in group by clauses, and then it is a blessing to have it pointed out by the compiler rather than having an erroneous result as in the example. This is especially the case when the query may have a complex group by clauses of many elements and perhaps even derived tables (e.g. select ... from (select .. from) left join (select ..), etc. In these cases it is so very easy to leave out a single field -- and I admit that I have sometimes been saved by the compiler. Now the query might generate data that are used directly in the application or perhaps even fed to further queries after storage, and so an error like that may propagate through the system. But even for simple queries it is a common mistake -- especially for someone new to SQL. Thus weighing for and against considering everybody, I find that it would be better not to have this "feature" but rather have the compiler return an error. Those who might be dependent upon the "feature" could have an option to enable it. I simply find that most would benefit from that - experienced as well people new to SQL / SQLite. Also, I think that if you need an arbitrary value it would be better to get that explicitly through usage of the random function. The other way is more obscure and is bad SQL code (in my opinion ;-). So I hope that there could be a way to not have this behaviour, but in the meantime I will check my SELECT statements like a hawk ;-) Best regards Frank _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
