Re: any way for ORDER BY x to imply NULLS FIRST in 8.3? - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Martijn van Oosterhout
Subject Re: any way for ORDER BY x to imply NULLS FIRST in 8.3?
Date
Msg-id 20071107150533.GC26157@svana.org
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: any way for ORDER BY x to imply NULLS FIRST in 8.3?  (Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>)
Responses Re: any way for ORDER BY x to imply NULLS FIRST in 8.3?  (Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>)
List pgsql-general
On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 02:37:41PM +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
> Editing an application, you would be required to add the words NULLS
> FIRST to every single ORDER BY and every single CREATE INDEX in an
> application. If we know that is what people would do, why not have one
> parameter to do this for them?

I find it hard to beleive that every single query in an application
depends on the ordering of NULLs. In fact, I don't think I've even
written a query that depended on a particular way of sorting NULLs. Is
it really that big a deal?

> Implement SQLServer and MySQL behaviour? Now we're talking about
> hundreds of new applications that might decide to migrate/support
> PostgreSQL because of our flexibility in being able to support both
> kinds of sorting.

TBH I think long term is should be attached to each column, as it is a
property of the collation (my COLLATE patch let you specify it per
column).

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog@svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
>  -- John F Kennedy

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