Re: [HACKERS] Case Preservation disregarding case

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 11:31 -0500, Chuck McDevitt wrote:

> But, stepping back from all that, what is it the users want?
>
> 1) When re-creating a CREATE TABLE statement from whatever catalog
> info, they'd like the names to come back exactly as then entered them.
> If I do:
> CREATE TABLE BobsTable (WeeklySales numeric(10,2),
> "SomeStrangeName" int);
>
> They'd like to see exactly that when the CREATE TABLE gets
> re-created, not what we do now:
>
> CREATE TABLE bobstable (weeklysales numeric(10,2),
> "SomeStrangeName" int);

This would be very good indEEd.

It can be very annoying trying to locate a table when the user swears
they called it one thing and actually the case or quotation is
different. Current behaviour isn't useful, even if it is "onspec" (or is
that OnSpec?). Would be better to make this behaviour a userset
switchable between the exactly compliant and the more intuitive.

We have namespaces to differentiate between two sources of object names,
so anybody who creates a schema where MyColumn is not the same thing as
myColumn is not following sensible rules for conceptual distance. It's
certainly an error of best practice, even if its not actually a bug.

> 2) When doing reports, they'd like the name as entered to be the title
> of the column:
> Select * from bobstable;
>
> Would be nice if they saw this:
> WeeklySales SomeStrangeName
> ----------- ---------------
...

> Producing "?column?" or somesuch to use in the report, it could return a
> title like "sum(WeeklySales)"

That would be just great. I'm not sure the spec says what the titles
should be, does it?

--
Simon Riggs
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com