Re: operator exclusion constraints

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 12:11 PM, David E. Wheeler <david@kineticode.com> wrote:
> On Nov 14, 2009, at 8:55 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>>> I've been meaning to comment on this syntax one more time; apologies for the bike-shedding. But I'm wondering if
the"CHECK" is strictly necessary there, since the WITH seems adequate, and there was some discussion before about the
CHECKkeyword possibly causing confusion with check constraints. 
>>
>> I had been manfully restraining myself from re-opening this discussion,
>> but yeah I was thinking the same thing.  The original objection to using
>> just WITH was that it wasn't very clear what you were doing "with" the
>> operator; but that was back when we had a different initial keyword for
>> the construct.  EXCLUDE ... WITH ... seems to match up pretty naturally.
>
> You're more man than I, Tom, but yeah, with EXCLUDE, WITH works well on its own, methinks.

I haven't thought about this too deeply, but could we allow the "with
=" part to be optional?  And would it be a good idea?  Seems like you
would commonly have one or more keys that exclude on equality and then
the last one would use an overlap-type operator.

...Robert