Re: group by true now errors with non-integer constant in GROUP BY

On 2023-08-28 Mo 15:56, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> The bigger picture here is: what is the use-case for grouping by a
> constant at all? Assuming that it is an error seems like a good
> foolproofing restriction. The reason we felt we could keep the
> "group by N" SQL92-ism after SQL99 redefined GROUP BY arguments is
> exactly that there's no obvious use-case for grouping by a constant.
> As soon as you allow it, "group by N" becomes hopelessly ambiguous.
>
> So my druthers would be to reject this as a non-bug. But if we accept
> it as something to fix, we need to revisit exactly which conditions
> are errors here. Perhaps rather than "reject all non-integer cases",
> we should only reject the Float case, and let others fall through to
> the SQL99 code. (I would not be happy allowing Float, because that'd
> mean that "group by 4" and "group by 4.0" mean fundamentally different
> things.)
>
>

I vote for treating it as a non-bug.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com