Re: GSoC 2017

Greg Stark wrote
> I don't think this even needs to be tied to currencies. I've often
> thought this would be generally useful for any value with units. This
> would prevent you from accidentally adding miles to kilometers or
> hours to parsecs which is just as valid as preventing you from adding
> CAD to USD.

There is already such a concept - not tied to currencies or units in
general. The SQL standard calls it DISTINCT types. And it can prevent
comparing apples to oranges.

I don't have the exact syntax at hand, but it's something like this:

create distinct type customer_id_type as integer;
create distinct type order_id_type as integer;

create table customers (id customer_id_type primary key);
create table orders (id order_id_type primary key, customer_id
customer_id_type not null);

And because those columns are defined with different types, the database
will refuse to compare customers.id with orders.id (just like it would
refuse to compare an integer with a date).

So an accidental join like this:

select *
from orders o
join customers c using (id);

would throw an error because the data types of the IDs can not be compared.

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