Oracle compatibility ...

Started by Hans-Jürgen Schönigabout 22 years ago2 messagespatches
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#1Hans-Jürgen Schönig
postgres@cybertec.at

This week I have been to Southern Germany. This customer has sucessfully
migrated from Oracle to PostgreSQL. With the help of a gborg package
(Oracle style data dictionary) and CREATE DOMAIN they were able to run
there current application WITHOUT modification.
There was just one thing we have encountered:

SELECT * FROM X MINUS SELECT * FROM X

does not work on PostgreSQL (we use EXCEPT instead).
This small patch fixes this problem.

Maybe it improvements can be integrated into 7.6

Regards

Hans

Attachments:

minus.patchtext/x-patch; name=minus.patchDownload+31-19
#2Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Hans-Jürgen Schönig (#1)
Re: Oracle compatibility ...

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hans-J=FCrgen_Sch=F6nig?= <postgres@cybertec.at> writes:

[ patch to support MINUS as a synonym for EXCEPT ]

I can't agree with doing this. MINUS is not a reserved word according
to SQL99, so supporting Oracle's syntax reduces our spec compatibility
by a visible amount. And for what? The behavior is *exactly* the same,
and all recent versions of Oracle accept the SQL-standard spelling
EXCEPT.

I counsel telling your customer to fix his application. A quick
s/MINUS/EXCEPT/g on his part won't cost anything.

regards, tom lane