Waiting for 9.1 – Removed autocast footgun

On 8th of November, Tom Lane committed patch, which doesn't provide any new features, but removes one of the more annoying footguns in PostgreSQL:

Prevent invoking I/O conversion casts via functional/attribute notation.
 
PG 8.4 added a built-in feature for casting pretty much any data type to
string types (text, varchar, etc).  We allowed this to work in any of the
historically-allowed syntaxes: CAST(x AS text), x::text, text(x), or
x.text.  However, multiple complaints have shown that it's too easy to
invoke such casts unintentionally in the latter two styles, particularly
field selection.  To cure the problem with the narrowest possible change
of behavior, disallow use of I/O conversion casts from composite types to
string types via functional/attribute syntax.  The new functionality is
still available via cast syntax.
 
In passing, document the equivalence of functional and attribute syntax
in a more visible place.

Continue reading Waiting for 9.1 – Removed autocast footgun

“ERROR: operator does not exist: integer = text” how to fix it?

PostgreSQL 8.3 brought us many great new features. Among them were concurrent autovacuum, enums, tsearch in core.

On of the changes though made a lot of people dislike 8.3. It was removal of implicit casts.

Continue reading “ERROR: operator does not exist: integer = text" how to fix it?