RE: Confusing information in sections 8.5 and 9.9 (date and timetypes, functions and operators)

Hello,

I thought about it once more.

I think I fell into trap of my own experience. I do not work with PG very often, that’s why I went into the manual to make sure what is the actual syntax. Second, in most cases in my professional use of any rdbms, we work with scripts (or PL/SQL procedures) and never use database API (my specialization are data warehouses). That’s probably why I never really cared if there were any differences in SQL between script execution and API call.

This was a use case that went out of my usual experience and that’s why I made a mistake that very few active developers or users of PostgreSQL can understand 😊

You guys decide if this single case requires any fixes in docs. If this has never happened in the last ten years, probably not.

Regards,

Jindra

From: David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2019 9:31 AM
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Cc: jindrich@vavruska.cz; pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Confusing information in sections 8.5 and 9.9 (date and time types, functions and operators)

On Friday, April 12, 2019, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:

On Tue, Apr  9, 2019 at 02:50:14PM +0000, PG Doc comments form wrote:
> The following documentation comment has been logged on the website:
>
I think
> this is a serious issue, especially because the alternative possibility of
> using ::timestamp is not even mentioned in chapters 8.5 or 9.9. If someone
> (like me) looks for specific information how to handle date & time literals,
> they will inevitably fall into the same trap.
> Since the experienced Syntax error is contrary to what one would expect
> after reading the SQL language manual, could you please at least add some
> hyperlink in both sections 8.5 and 9.9 to attract reader's attention to this
> specific behavior of the database server? Thank you.

We don't get this question very often.  I wonder if you didn't look at
the error message we generated, or if you could share the exact error
you saw.