Re: PostgreSQL Gotchas

Chris Travers <chris(at)travelamericas(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Since the end reward for all this work would be having to read CATALOGS
>> WRITTEN IN ALL UPPER CASE, none of the key developers seem very
>> interested ...
>>
> Why would this be required?

If you write, say,

select max(relpages) from pg_class;

and the lexer thinks that it should fold unquoted identifiers to upper
case, then the catalog entries defining these names had better read
PG_CLASS, RELPAGES, and MAX, not the lower-case names they contain
today. So this wouldn't be something you could flip on-the-fly --- at
the latest, an installation would have to commit to upper or lower case
at initdb time, because the initial contents of all the system catalogs
would need to match the choice.

Please read the previous discussions on the topic, if you want to
pontificate about it.

regards, tom lane