Re: record identical operator

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:

> making an SQL operator for 'are these really the same bytes' to
> deal with what is essentially implementation detail is _very_
> grotty.

We already have some such operators, although Andres argues that
comparing to that isn't fair because we at least know it is a
string of characters; we're just ignoring character boundaries and
collations.  Some of the operators use for the existing byte
comparison opclasses are:

~<~ ~<=~ ~>=~ ~>~

Go ahead and try them out with existing text values.  Andres has
said that he has seen these used in production systems.

= and <> aren't listed above even though they do a byte-for-byte
comparison because, well, I guess because we have chosen to treat
two UTF8 strings which produce the same set of glyphs using
different bytes as unequal.  :-/

--
Kevin Grittner
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company