Re: Plans for index names unique to a table?

On Saturday 10 May 2003 10:12 am, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 12:10:08PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

> > We'd also be creating some compatibility headaches --- for instance,
> > DROP INDEX would have to change syntax to include the table name.
>
> True... maybe a compatability mode, or making the table name optional as
> long as you identify a unique index name.
>
> Personally, I think the ugliest thing is to leave it as-is; globally
> named indexes just seem really stupid, imho.

Some of us are a lot more interested in being able to support datamodels in 
multiple RDBMS's and for us, compatibility with SQL99 is far more important 
than "fixing" things that might seem really stupid to various people.

SQL is full of such things, I'm sure we can each shortlist a half-dozen of our 
favorite pet peeves, but personally I'd rather deal with the stupidity than 
sacrifice the portability that standards support brings.

Indexes, views, tables - all are global namespace thingies and therefore 
required to be globally unique in SQL.  At least SQL's consistent in its 
treatment of names.