Re: Allow disabling folding of unquoted identifiers to lowercase

That's an interesting idea! The client users would use is probably pgAdmin.
I don't know whether pgAdmin parses the query, though. If it does then it
should be relatively easy to add this. If not, I'd imagine it's not going
to happen.

On 2 May 2016 at 13:59, John McKown <john(dot)archie(dot)mckown(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 3:03 AM, Evgeny Morozov <
> evgeny(dot)morozov+list+pgsql(at)shift-technology(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> On 30 April 2016 at 01:31, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>
>>> Yeah, this isn't going to happen. Years ago we looked into what it would
>>> take to be able to flip a switch and have the standard-compliant behavior
>>> (fold to upper not lower). It was impractical then and no doubt is far
>>> more so now. I do not remember all the details, but there were multiple
>>> pain points even in terms of server-side implementation, never mind all
>>> the applications we'd break.
>>>
>>
>> Alright, thanks to everyone for looking into this. Not knowing the code,
>> I naively assumed it should be easy to add an option to not do the case
>> folding.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> What the OP is asking for doesn't even have the argument "but it's
>>> standards compliant!" going for it.
>>>
>>> Indeed, my argument was it would allow people to choose their own naming
>> convention to (easily) use with Postgres, which would in turn make it
>> easier to migrate from other RDBMSes to Postgres. Although, if you want a
>> standard compliance argument, that can easily be added. :) Just have 3
>> options: fold to lowercase (current behaviour, default), fold to uppercase
>> (standards compliant), do not fold (most flexible, compatible with MSSQL
>> and MySQL).
>>
>> > So I doubt we'd accept such a patch even if someone managed to create
>> one.
>>
>> Well, I was going to ask if paying someone to fix this was an option, but
>> this preempts that!
>>
>
> ​I have a silly idea. IIRC, your original problem is that your users are
> in the habit of entering something like:
>
> select ... from SomeTable ...
>
> And MySQL would actually use the name "SomeTable" (case preserving) and
> not "sometable" (PostgreSQL) or "SOMETABLE" (SQL standard). What program
> are the users actually using to do the select? If it is something like
> "psql", perhaps it would actually be easier to create a modified version
> which automatically inserts the " marks for them. Of course, you are now
> doing double parsing of the SQL. First in the client, to modify it before
> sending to the server. Then again in the server. OK, maybe it is going too
> far. I guess this might be a "quote everything which is not a keyword"
> option for a psql replacement. Or whatever the front end is that the users
> use.
>
>
> --
> The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our
> certitude.
>
> Maranatha! <><
> John McKown
>