Re: Windowing Function Patch Review -> NTILE function

2008/11/9 David Rowley <dgrowley@gmail.com>:
>
> I've done a little testing with NTILE(). I think a check should be added to
> the ntile() function in wfunc.c.
>
> david=# select name,salary,ntile(0) over (order by salary) as n from
> employees;
> ERROR:  floating-point exception
> DETAIL:  An invalid floating-point operation was signaled. This probably
> means an out-of-range result or an invalid operation, such as division by
> zero.
>
> I tracked that message back to the signal handler in postgres.c :-( simple
> fix though. Any value less than 1 does not really make sense to me.
>
> Maybe we should add something like:
>
> if (PG_WINDOW_ARG(0) < 1)
>  elog(ERROR, "negative or zero ntile argument not allowed");
>
> What do you think?
>
> Oracle errors out on less than 1, Sybase seems not to have ntile.
> MSSQL 2008 also errors out on less than 1
>
> David.
>
>

I am so sorry but I missed this thread.

I found in the spec:
1) If NT is the null value, then the result is the null value.
2) If NT is less than or equal to 0 (zero), then an exception
condition is raised: data exception
― invalid argument for NTILE function.

My patch violates both of two :-( As you point, we must add the value
check and also allow null case to return null.

will be fixed soon.


Regards,


-- 
Hitoshi Harada