Re: Review: listagg aggregate

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> But what it *produces* is a string.  For comparison, the
>>> SQL-standard-specified array_agg produces arrays, but what it
>>> acts on isn't an array.
>
>> This point is well-taken, but naming it string_agg() because it
>> produces a string doesn't seem quite descriptive enough.  We might
>> someday (if we don't already) have a number of aggregates that produce
>> an output that is a string; we can't name them all by the output type.
>
> True, but the same point could be made against array_agg, and that
> didn't stop the committee from choosing that name.  As long as
> string_agg is the "most obvious" aggregate-to-string functionality,
> which ISTM it is, I think it's all right for it to have pride of place
> in naming.

Maybe so, but personally, I'd still prefer something more descriptive.

...Robert