Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 12:47:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: Stephan Szabo <sszabo@megazone23.bigpanda.com>
To: "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>,
	<pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [SQL] id and ID in CREATE TABLE 
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0207191318230.3990-100000@css120.ihs.com>
Message-ID: <20020719124206.U84503-100000@megazone23.bigpanda.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, scott.marlowe wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com> writes:
> > > Agreed.  Absolutely.  But, since the SQL standard says upper case,
> > > wouldn't it be useful to at least have a switch (run time, initdb time,
> > > or ./configure time???) called something like FOLDTOUPPER (in upper case
> > > of course :-)
> >
> > The main problem with this is what do you do with the system catalogs?
> > If we start folding to upper case then existing clients will break
> > unless we also rename pg_class to PG_CLASS, etc; and that will break
> > them anyway if they wrote "pg_class".
> >
> > I don't believe that conforming to this particular small aspect of the
> > spec is worth the pain it would cause.
>
> But it's not a small aspect if it means someone either can't use an app
> with postgresql because it was written to spec, or someone has to spend
> a bunch of time rewriting all their queries to work with postgresql.

Presumably that's only true if they're mixing quoted and unquoted
identifiers, which is a bad idea in any case (since what happens to "foo"
and foo - do you trust somebody who's mixing them to get it right
everywhere :) ?) or their application is using the names returned
elsewhere (which is a problem with doing it as lower).

If
create table FOO(col1 int, Col2 int, cOL3 int);
select COL1 from foo;
failed, I think people would be more interested in changing it.