Re: Is there a drawback when changing NAMEDATALEN to 64?

On Thursday, January 24, 2002, at 06:53 , Tom Lane wrote:

> BTW, I noticed the other day that both SQL92 and SQL99 specify the
> maximum identifier length as 128.  So really there is a standardization
> argument for pushing it up to 128 ...

Yeah, I realize this was a month ago. :)

One question: What is an identifier defined as?  The reason I'm being
pendantic is that I've run into trouble not with any particular table or
column name being > 32, but the automated key name generated for tables
with a NOT NULL UNIQUE column is table_column_key, which easily busts
the limit.

The reason I ask is because if an identifier is only defined as
something like a column name or table name, then NAMEDATALEN would have
to be 128+128+5, if I did the math right.

BTW, I keep my patch for configuring it in 7.1 at:

http://www.zettabyte.net/downloads/postgres/namedatalen-patch/

in case anyone needs it.

-Bill