Re: greatest/least semantics different between oracle and postgres

["John D. Burger" <john(at)mitre(dot)org>]

Tom Lane wrote:

> Anyway, there's no doubt that we can point to the behavior of MAX/MIN
> as defense for what we made GREATEST/LEAST do, so I'm inclined to  
> leave
> their behavior alone, at least until such time as they're actually
> standardized.

I don't think I buy this - MIN and MAX are aggregates, GREATEST is  
just a function, yes?  There would seem to be a very strong analogy  
with SUM and the addition function, yet 2 + NULL is NULL, while SUM  
ignores NULLs.  (Not in front of a console, sorry if I'm mistaken.)

- John Burger
  MITRE