BUG #2764: Capital letter in tables or columns not supported

On 11/17/06, Ron Teitelbaum <ron@usmedrec.com> wrote:

The following bug has been logged online:

Bug reference: 2764
Logged by: Ron Teitelbaum
Email address: ron@usmedrec.com
PostgreSQL version: 1.4.1
Operating system: Windows
Description: Capital letter in tables or columns not supported
Details:

I ran into a very weird problem that tured out to be a capital letter in the
table name or column name. When trying to query a table with a capital
letter in the name I get error relation not defined.

I can get it to work with something like:
select * from "zipCodes"

It appears to be completely case insensitive if the table is all lowercase.

that's not a bug... if you create a table or column with capital
letters postgres transform it to lowercase...

if you don't want that you need to double quotes...

create table "Foo" (Col1 int);
select * from "Foo";

--
regards,
Jaime Casanova

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs and the universe trying
to produce bigger and better idiots.
So far, the universe is winning."
Richard Cook

On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 19:40 +0000, Ron Teitelbaum wrote:

Description: Capital letter in tables or columns not supported

Unquoted identifiers are always smashed down to lowercase. Quoted
identifiers are taken verbatim, including case.

This is not a bug: it's documented in
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/sql-syntax.html#SQL-SYNTAX-IDENTIFIERS . Oracle has the same behavior, but uppercase unquoted identfiers. I seem to recall reading that the SQL spec requires that identifiers be treated as one or the other, but doesn't say which (upper or lower).

rkh@csb-dev=> create temp table test (lccol text, Uccol text, ALLUCCOL
text, "lccol_q" text, "Uccol_q" text, "ALLUCCOL_q" text);
CREATE TABLE
Time: 233.815 ms

rkh@csb-dev=> \d test
Table "pg_temp_1.test"
Column | Type | Modifiers
------------+------+-----------
lccol | text |
uccol | text |
alluccol | text |
lccol_q | text |
Uccol_q | text |
ALLUCCOL_q | text |

-rEecE (take your pick on case)

--
Reece Hart, http://harts.net/reece/, GPG:0x25EC91A0
./universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -protonmass 1.673e-27 -uspres bush
kernel warning: universe consuming too many resources. Killing.
universe received SIGKILL due to catastrophic leadership. Try -uspres carter.

Jaime Casanova wrote:

On 11/17/06, Ron Teitelbaum <ron@usmedrec.com> wrote:

The following bug has been logged online:

Bug reference: 2764
Logged by: Ron Teitelbaum
Email address: ron@usmedrec.com
PostgreSQL version: 1.4.1
Operating system: Windows
Description: Capital letter in tables or columns not supported
Details:

I ran into a very weird problem that tured out to be a capital letter in the
table name or column name. When trying to query a table with a capital
letter in the name I get error relation not defined.

I can get it to work with something like:
select * from "zipCodes"

It appears to be completely case insensitive if the table is all lowercase.

that's not a bug... if you create a table or column with capital
letters postgres transform it to lowercase...

if you don't want that you need to double quotes...

create table "Foo" (Col1 int);
select * from "Foo";

I added a mention of "capitalization" in the FAQ item on this:

<H3 id="item4.21">4.21) Why are my table and column names not
recognized in my query? Why is capitalization not preserved?</H3>

--
Bruce Momjian bruce@momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +