Re: Allowing postgresql to accept 0xff syntax for data types that it makes sense for?

On Thu, 21 May 2015 13:57:24 -0400
Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Bill Moran <wmoran(at)potentialtech(dot)com> writes:
> > My other question: is there a specific reason why PostgreSQL doesn't support
> > this syntax, aside from "nobody has bothered to add such support"? Because
> > I'm considering writing a patch to Postgres and submitting it, but I'm not
> > going to go down that path if there's a specific reason why supporting this
> > syntax would be _bad_. Personally, I feel like it would be a good thing, as
> > it seems like a lot of other database systems support it, and even though
> > it's not ANSI, it's pretty much the de-facto standard.
>
> How many is "a lot", and do any of the responsible vendors sit on the SQL
> standards committee?

Well, I've personally worked with (in addition to PostgreSQL) Microsoft
SQL Server, MySQL, and Sybase -- PostgreSQL is the only one of those 4 that
doesn't support the 0xff syntax.

I did a litle research and it appears that neither Oracle nor db2 supports
the 0xff syntax ... so not _quite_ as common as it seemed to me.

> One large concern about doing anything like this is whether future
> versions of the SQL standard might blindside us with some
> not-terribly-compatible interpretation of that syntax. If we do something
> that is also in Oracle or DB2 or one of the other big boys, then we can
> probably rely on the assumption that they'll block anything really
> incompatible from becoming standardized ;-).

I assume that Microsoft is big enough to prevent anything that would
hurt SQL Server's compatibility from becomming a standard?

> OTOH, if the actual meaning of "a lot" is "MySQL", I'd be pretty worried
> about this scenario.

Well, MySQL _does_ support that syntax ... but I couldn't care less. MySQL
also throws away your data instead of giving you errors and I would never
ask PostgreSQL to start behaving like that.

With all that being said, if I were to build a patch, would it be likely
to be accepted into core?

--
Bill Moran