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From: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
To: David Rowley <[email protected]>
Cc: Tim Starling <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Upsert error "column reference is ambiguous"
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:51:58 -0400
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAApHDvq-EUKOm2rSFoctDoXYdV-rJis9y9GcmsBiqcO7DbaGpQ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <[email protected]>
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David Rowley <[email protected]> writes:
> Another thought is that you can have an UPDATE with a RETURNING
> clause. An unqualified column defaults to NEW even though you could
> argue it's ambiguous due to OLD (as of 80feb727c). Likely we were
> forced into making it work that way through not wanting to force
> everyone to rewrite their RETURNING statements when upgrading to v18.
> The moral of that story is, UPDATE isn't exactly consistent already
> about when it requires column qualifications. Maybe it's weird to
> insist that users qualify columns with their ON CONFLICT UPDATE SET
> when RETURNING is happy to assume you must have meant NEW.

That's an analogy I hadn't thought of, and it does seem on-point.
You might be right that we would not have done it like that if
we'd invented RETURNING's ability to support "OLD" at the get-go.
Nonetheless, it's there now and is a pretty similar precedent.

			regards, tom lane

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