Re: [PATCH] GROUP BY ALL

On Tue, Jul 23, 2024 at 10:57 AM Laurenz Albe <laurenz(dot)albe(at)cybertec(dot)at> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2024-07-23 at 08:37 -0500, David Christensen wrote:
> > My intention here was to basically be a shorthand for "group by
> > specified non-aggregate fields in the select list". Perhaps I'm not
> > being creative enough, but what is the interpretation/use case for
> > anything else? :-)
>
> I am somewhat against this feature.
> It is too much magic for my taste.
>
> It might be handy for interactive use, but I would frown at an application
> that uses code like that, much like I'd frown at "SELECT *" in application code.

Sure, not everything that makes things easier is strictly necessary;
we could require `CAST(field AS text)` instead of `::text`, make
subqueries required for transforming oids into specific system tables
instead of `::regfoo` casts, any number of other choices, remove
`SELECT *` as a parse option, but making it easier to do common things
interactively as a DBA has value as well.

David