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Non-Positional INSERT statement

Open EPluribusUnum opened this issue 3 months ago • 3 comments

https://www.geraldonit.com/non-positional-insert-statement-insider-story/

"Standardization of non-positional INSERT

We believe the non-positional INSERT statement significantly enhances the SQL language. Therefore, Oracle plans to propose this comprehensive feature set to the SQL Standard Committee for inclusion in the next version of the SQL standard. I mentioned earlier that we already had discussions with the committee, but that was an understatement. I had the privilege of presenting the non-positional INSERT concepts to the committee at the June 2025 meeting, and based on the initial feedback, I am optimistic about a favorable outcome."

Consider to implement it.

EPluribusUnum avatar Sep 09 '25 11:09 EPluribusUnum

Unless and until this is indeed in the standard, I don't think we should implement this.

mrotteveel avatar Sep 09 '25 16:09 mrotteveel

Unless and until this is indeed in the standard, I don't think we should implement this.

Why. Normal insert is error prone. You can simply mistakenly set wrong field.

livius2 avatar Sep 11 '25 19:09 livius2

Why. Normal insert is error prone. You can simply mistakenly set wrong field.

  1. Because as long as it isn't standardized, you run the risk of implementing a different syntax than what ends up in the standard. As an example, the ROWS clause was originally claimed to be the SQL-standard alternative to FIRST/SKIP, because - IIRC - it was based on a proposal or draft version; unfortunately, during standardization a different syntax was ultimately chosen (OFFSET ... FETCH ...), so now we have three syntax variants: 2 non-standard and 1 standard.
  2. Having tons of non-standard different ways of doing things is not conducive to ease of understanding or use; it is also where the bugs go and hide (both in Firebird itself and in user code)
  3. We've been able to live without this for 40+ years

mrotteveel avatar Sep 12 '25 07:09 mrotteveel