Re: Things I don't like about \du's "Attributes" column

Isaac Morland <isaac.morland@gmail.com>

From: Isaac Morland <isaac.morland@gmail.com>
To: Pavel Luzanov <p.luzanov@postgrespro.ru>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2023-12-30T14:33:59Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Sat, 30 Dec 2023 at 09:23, Pavel Luzanov <p.luzanov@postgrespro.ru>
wrote:


> I think that writing the value "infinity" in places where there is no
> value is
> not a good thing. This hides the real value of the column. In addition,
> there is no reason to set "infinity" when the password is always valid with
> default NULL.
>

Would it make sense to make the column non-nullable and always set it to
infinity when there is no expiry?

In this case, I think NULL simply means infinity, so why not write that? If
the timestamp type didn't have infinity, then NULL would be a natural way
of saying that there is no expiry, but with infinity as a possible value, I
don't see any reason to think of no expiry as being the absence of an
expiry time rather than an infinite expiry time.