Details
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New Feature
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Status: Resolved
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Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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0.4.0
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None
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None
Description
Proposal for implementing a CAST mechanism in Drill.
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The casting mechanism would be of two types
- Implicit type casting
- Explicit type casting
Details:
- The Implicit type cast would take care of the casting of the lower datatype holders to the higher datatype holders automatically.
Eg. IntHolder would be casted to Float4Holder/Float8Holder directly.
- The explicit type casting would enable the user to use a CAST() function to cast some value to another datatype by specifying the type. The cast function would be a function exposed with syntax similar to standard SQL format.
Eg. SELECT CAST (somevalue AS INT) FROM sometable;
Type conversion rules:
Conversion rules have to be similar to SQL standards.
Implicit type conversion:
- For arithmetic & comparison operators (+, -, *, /, <, >, =, etc) -
- If both operands types are different, Strings would be converted to Double, and then both the operands would be converted to the same type by choosing the type with higher precision.
- For values passed to a Function/UDF -
- The values would be converted to the parameter accepted by the Function.
- In case of multiple overloaded functions are present, the function with least number of conversions would be selected.
- In case there are multiple functions with least number of conversions, there would be an error returned to user for ambiguous function.
Explicit Type Conversion
- User would use the CAST Function for converting types to another specified type.
- For nonconvertible types user gets an error back.