Re: greatest/least semantics different between oracle and postgres - Mailing list pgsql-general

From John D. Burger
Subject Re: greatest/least semantics different between oracle and postgres
Date
Msg-id 8A71F52A-827B-456D-B75A-EF1CD1B15F57@mitre.org
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: greatest/least semantics different between oracle and postgres  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-general
Tom Lane wrote:

> Anyway, there's no doubt that we can point to the behavior of MAX/MIN
> as defense for what we made GREATEST/LEAST do, so I'm inclined to
> leave
> their behavior alone, at least until such time as they're actually
> standardized.

I don't think I buy this - MIN and MAX are aggregates, GREATEST is
just a function, yes?  There would seem to be a very strong analogy
with SUM and the addition function, yet 2 + NULL is NULL, while SUM
ignores NULLs.  (Not in front of a console, sorry if I'm mistaken.)

- John Burger
   MITRE

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