Re: What is the name pseudo column

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 01:50:54PM -0600, Jack Christensen wrote:
> I was just surprised when accidentally selecting a non-existent name
> column there was no error -- instead something came back.
>
> select accounts.name from accounts limit 1 ->
> (1,65522,1,0.00,,"2010-07-22 09:57:26.281172-05",2)
>
> It appears it tries to return the entire row in an array (but longer
> rows get truncated).
>
> I've searched Google and the PG docs but I haven't had any luck.

What happened here is that you ran into PostgreSQL's "charming" habit
of using the argument.function notation, so you called the "name"
function, i.e. the one that casts to name, on the entire row from your
accounts table.

Cheers,
David.
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