Re: adding an immutable variant of to_date

On 03/03/2017 10:41 PM, Sven R. Kunze wrote:
> What do you think?

I have some thoughts:

1) I do not think we currently allow setting the locale like this
anywhere, so this will introduce a new concept to PostgreSQL. And you
will probably need to add support for caching per locale.

2) As far as I can tell from reading the code to_date currently ignores
the M suffix which indicates that you want localized month/day names, so
i guess that to_date is currently immutable. Maybe it is stable due to
the idea that we may want to support the M suffix in the future.

3) I do not like the to_date function. It is much too forgiving with
invalid input. For example 2017-02-30 because 2017-03-02. Also just
ignoring the M suffix in the format string seems pretty bad

Personally I would rather see a new date parsing function which is
easier to work with or somehow fix to_date without pissing too many
users off, but I have no idea if this is a view shared with the rest of
the community.

Andreas