Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 13:46:41 -0400
From: Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca>
To: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>,
	PostgreSQL advocacy <pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] What can we learn from MySQL?
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	PostgreSQL advocacy <pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org>
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	<1082735128.22969.1106.camel@camel>
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On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 11:45:28AM -0400, Robert Treat wrote:

> lower will now simply be folder upper. the only people who will have a
> problem are those who quote on one end but not the other, which is bad
> practice anyways...  so i would say if your serious about it, make the
> patch as GUC "case_folding" for upper or lower and get a taste for what
> breaks inside the db. 

If it were that easy, it wouldn't matter, right?  That is, if you had
a system which was either consistently quoted or consistently
unquoted, then you'd never run into the problem of the upper-or-lower
question.

It's precisely _because_ systems often have been maintained by
various cranks for 20 years that it's a problem.  One guy thinks
quoting is stupid.  Another thinks that if you don't quote, you're
asking for trouble,  A third has been rigourous in following the
quoting convention he learned in his last job.  The ship date is
three weeks away, and there are 802 "P1" bugs filed.  What chance do
you think there is that someone is going to scrub all the checkins of
quotes (or apply them carefully)?  This is _exactly_ why standards
compliance for this stuff matters, and why backward comaptibility is
also a top priority.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca