Re: Bug 1500

Lyubomir Petrov <lpetrov@sysmaster.com> writes:
> I have found what is causing the crash described in Bug 1500. Now I 
> would like to fix it, but need opinions about what is the correct behaviour.

Yeah, I just came to the same conclusion a little while ago:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2005-03/msg00908.php

> Also the general to_char()  Interval formatting seems broken anyway. 

Karel Zak has stated repeatedly that interval_to_char is fundamentally
wrong and should be removed.  I'm not sure it's quite as bad as that,
but it does seem that a different set of formatting codes is needed for
intervals as opposed to timestamps.  Textual 'MON' doesn't even make any
sense for intervals really, AFAICS.  I could see displaying an interval
in terms of '4 months', but 'April' makes no sense.

Does Oracle have to_char for intervals, and if so how do they define it?

Anyway, even if we think it's broken enough to remove going forward,
we need some kind of stopgap fix to prevent the coredump in existing
releases.
        regards, tom lane