Re: [SQL] Case Preservation disregarding case

On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 10:51 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > We have namespaces to differentiate between two sources of object names,
> > so anybody who creates a schema where MyColumn is not the same thing as
> > myColumn is not following sensible rules for conceptual distance.
> 
> I'd agree that that is not a good design practice, but the fact remains
> that they *are* different per spec.
> 
> > Would be better to make this behaviour a userset
> > switchable between the exactly compliant and the more intuitive.
> 
> That's certainly not happening --- if you make any changes in the
> semantics of equality of type name, it would have to be frozen no
> later than initdb time, for exactly the same reasons we freeze
> locale then (hint: index ordering).

[Re-read all of this after Bruce's post got me thinking.]

My summary of the thread, with TODO items noted:

1. PostgreSQL doesn't follow the spec, but almost does, with regard to
comparison of unquoted and quoted identifiers. DB2 does this per spec.

2. TODO: We could follow the spec, but it would need an initdb option;
some non-SQL:2003 standard PostgreSQL programs would not work as they do
now. This is considered a minor, low priority item, though.

3. TODO: We could set column headers better if we wanted to (rather
than ?column? we could use e.g. Sum_ColumnName etc)

--  Simon Riggs              EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com