From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Philip Warner <pjw@rhyme.com.au>
Cc: Carolyn Lu Wong <carolyn@kss.net.au>
Cc: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: SQL question
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 01:48:48 -0400
Message-ID: <28464.963812928@sss.pgh.pa.us> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000717141152.022dd100@mail.rhyme.com.au>
References: <3.0.5.32.20000717121856.022cd100@mail.rhyme.com.au>
<3.0.5.32.20000717141152.022dd100@mail.rhyme.com.au>
Philip Warner <pjw@rhyme.com.au> writes:
> Another alternative would be to define a 'coalesce' function (I don't think
> PG has one), which takes an arbitrary number of arguments and returns the
> first non-null one.
We surely do have that! It even works pretty well in 7.0 ;-)
(I think there were still some bugs lurking in 6.5.)
The immediate cause of this gripe was discussed just a day or so ago
on one or another of the pgsql lists. The timestamp-to-date conversion
routine has this weird idea that it should kick out an error instead
of returning NULL when presented with a NULL timestamp. That's a bug
IMHO, and I've already changed the code in current sources.
COALESCE would be a good workaround if you don't want to patch your
local copy of 7.0.*.
regards, tom lane
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To: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Cc: tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, pjw@rhyme.com.au, carolyn@kss.net.au
Subject: Re: SQL question
In-Reply-To: <28464.963812928@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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