On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 4:45 PM, David Fetter <david@fetter.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 10:40:57AM -0600, Merlin Moncure wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 4:38 AM, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> > Implicit casts to text, anybody?
>>
>> This backward compatibility break orphaned the company I work for on
>> 8.1 until last year and very nearly caused postgres to be summarily
>> extirpated (only rescued at the last minute by my arrival). It cost
>> hundreds of thousands of dollars to qualify a sprawling java code base
>> so that it could be moved back into a supported version. Breaking
>> compatibility sucks -- it hurts your users and costs people money.
>> Hacking type casts may not have been a mistake, but the arbitrary
>> introduction of the breakage certainly was.
>
> With utmost respect, it was not. Databases are no good if there are
> fixable things in them that cause them to produce incorrect results at
> random, as auto-casting to text did.
With a precisely equal level of respect, that's a load of bunk. As
has been discussed here many times in the past, those changes broke
many applications that were just fine. Mine included, EnterpriseDB's
included. It was designed to maximize rather than minimize breakage
in ways that were completely unnecessary, and every time anyone dares
to argue that the change was less than perfect in every respect, the
reponses evince a level of dubiousness normally reserved for the
parole hearings of convicted murderers.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
