Thread: Re: [BUGS] BUG #2907: pg_get_serial_sequence quoting

Adriaan van Os wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 
> > Strangely, this was reported before, but not until November of 2006:
> > 
> >     http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2006-11/msg01111.php
> 
> That was a follow up on this thread 
> <http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-10/msg00964.php>.

Interesting.  In this thread the reason for the current behavior is
given as:

> I presume the reason for that is that the first paramater can be
> qualified:
> 
> select pg_get_serial_sequence('"public"."FOO"', 'Ff1');

Would someone explain why qualification makes us lowercase the first
parameter by default?  I don't understand it well enough to document it.
I notice this does not work:
test=> SELECT pg_get_serial_sequence('"Test"', '"Xx"');

So do we just say because quotes might be needed to distinguish the
schame from the table name, we don't auto-quote the first parameter?

--  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +

Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
>> I presume the reason for that is that the first paramater can be
>> qualified:
>> select pg_get_serial_sequence('"public"."FOO"', 'Ff1');

> Would someone explain why qualification makes us lowercase the first
> parameter by default?  I don't understand it well enough to document it.

The point is that we have to parse the first parameter, whereas the
second one can be taken literally.
        regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
>>> I presume the reason for that is that the first paramater can be
>>> qualified:
>>> select pg_get_serial_sequence('"public"."FOO"', 'Ff1');
> 
>> Would someone explain why qualification makes us lowercase the first
>> parameter by default?  I don't understand it well enough to document it.
> 
> The point is that we have to parse the first parameter, whereas the
> second one can be taken literally.

It still looks inconsistent and ugly. I think the design mistake of pg_get_serial_sequence is that 
it takes two parameters rather than one (a fully qualified doublequoted columnname path) or three 
(optionally empty schema, tablename, columnname, all three literal).

Regards,

Adriaan van Os