Re: strange IS NULL behaviour - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: strange IS NULL behaviour
Date
Msg-id 13916.1378261658@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: strange IS NULL behaviour  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: strange IS NULL behaviour
List pgsql-hackers
I wrote:
> And I will say once more that a patch that affects only the behavior of
> eval_const_expressions can be rejected on its face.  That code has to be
> kept in sync with the behavior of execQual.c, not just whacked around by
> itself.  And then there are the NOT NULL constraint cases to worry about.

Hmm ... actually, it's already not in sync, because:

regression=# create table tt (x int);
CREATE TABLE
regression=# insert into tt values(null);
INSERT 0 1
regression=# select row(x) from tt;row 
-----()
(1 row)

regression=# select row(row(x)) from tt; row   
--------("()")
(1 row)

regression=# select row(row(row(x))) from tt;    row      
--------------("(""()"")")
(1 row)

There's certainly no excuse for this behaving differently from the cases
with a simple constant NULL.  So I'm a bit inclined to say that we should
rip out the special case in eval_const_expressions, not make it even less
self-consistent.  It's possible to argue that existing applications won't
be too sensitive to the behavior of the constant cases, but they surely
must be depending on the behavior in the non-constant cases.
        regards, tom lane



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