Subject: Re: Why mention to Oracle ?

From: Tomas Vondra <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 16:56:48 +0200

On 9/20/24 14:36, Marcos Pegoraro wrote:
> Why PostgreSQL DOCs needs to show or compare the Oracle way of doing
> things ?
> 
> I understand that on page Porting from Oracle PL/SQL is ok to mention
> Oracle, but there are other places where it's not needed. Or, if it's ok
> to mention, why not mention SQL Server or MySQL or any other ?
> 

It's not quite clear to me whether your suggestion is to not mention any
other databases ever, or to always mention every existing one. ;-)

I didn't dig into all the places you mention, but I'd bet those places
reference Oracle simply because it was the most common DB people either
migrated from or needed to support in their application next to PG, and
thus were running into problems. The similarity of the interfaces and
SQL dialects also likely played a role. It's less likely to run into
subtle behavior differences e.g. SQL Server when you have to rewrite
T-SQL stuff from scratch anyway.

regards

-- 
Tomas Vondra

---

From: Tom Lane <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 11:53:49 -0400

> T-SQL stuff from scratch anyway.

As far as the mentions in "Data Type Formatting Functions" go, those
are there because those functions are not in the SQL standard; we
stole the API definitions for them from Oracle, lock stock and barrel.
(Except for the discrepancies that are called out by referencing what
Oracle does differently.)  A number of the other references probably
have similar origins.

			regards, tom lane

---

From: Marcos Pegoraro <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:31:47 -0300

> Oracle does differently.)  A number of the other references probably

All the time we see somebody adding a new function to Postgres core that
exists in Python or GO or MySQL, but none of them are mentioned on DOCS.

I did never use Oracle but I'm almost sure on Oracle DOCS there are no
mentions of Postgres, right ? Why do we need to mention it ?

Regards
Marcos