Re: Naming functions with reserved words

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 01:46:13AM -0700, Scott Bailey wrote:
> I noticed in the temporal project they used reserved words for their
> functions (union, intersect, etc)
>
> But when I try to create a function like that I get an error and I have
> to quote it both when creating the function and when calling it. The
> only difference I can see is they their functions are written in C and
> mine are in SQL. But that doesn't make sense why you could do it in one
> language and not in another.
>
> What am I missing? And if it can be done, is there a strong preference
> in the community about whether it should be the reserved word or follow
> PostGIS's tack and prepend something to all of the functions like
> ts_union and ts_intersect?

As you've observed above, it's a really, really bad idea to name any
database object with a reserved word.  Descriptive names are better.

That said, you *can* do it by double-quoting each.

SELECT "SELECT" FROM "FROM" WHERE "WHERE" = "=";

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778  AIM: dfetter666  Yahoo!: dfetter
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