auto-conversion of string to sht type no longer works

[monetdb-team]

Date: 2014-07-14 17:33:41 +0200
From: Anthony Damico <>
To: SQL devs <>
Version: 11.17.17 (Jan2014-SP2)
CC: ajdamico, @hannesmuehleisen, @njnes

Last updated: 2014-10-31 14:15:04 +0100

Comment 19901

Date: 2014-07-14 17:33:41 +0200
From: Anthony Damico <>

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0
Build Identifier:

this CASTing worked on previous versions of MonetDB, it does not work on SP-2 windows. Hannes tested on SP-1 and said it did not fail there.

it is now preventing the PISA script from working

https://github.com/ajdamico/usgsd/tree/master/Program%20for%20International%20Student%20Assessment

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

create table test (a varchar(100) ) ;
INSERT INTO test (a) VALUES ('0.10');
INSERT INTO test (a) VALUES ('9999.00') ;
UPDATE test SET a = NULL WHERE a IN ( 9999 ) ;

Actual Results:

Welcome to mclient, the MonetDB/SQL interactive terminal (Jan2014-SP2)
Database: MonetDB v11.17.17 (Jan2014-SP2), 'demo'
Type \q to quit, ? for a list of available commands
auto commit mode: on
sql>
sql>create table test (a varchar(100) ) ;
operation successful (222.637ms)
sql>INSERT INTO test (a) VALUES ('0.10');
1 affected row (35.888ms)
sql>INSERT INTO test (a) VALUES ('9999.00') ;
1 affected row (14.665ms)
sql>UPDATE test SET a = NULL WHERE a IN ( 9999 ) ;
conversion of string '0.10' to type sht failed.
sql>
sql>

Expected Results:

the second row '9999.00' should turn to NULL

Comment 19902

Date: 2014-07-14 17:40:55 +0200
From: @hannesmuehleisen

It did work with SP1, even if it probably should not have. Regardless, something that did not complain before now does. Breaks things...

Comment 19903

Date: 2014-07-14 17:43:14 +0200
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset 659ff3ba93e7 made by Hannes Muehleisen hannes@cwi.nl in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=659ff3ba93e7

Changeset description:

Test for Bug #3512

Comment 19938

Date: 2014-07-31 10:16:19 +0200
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset d5baebc17f07 made by Hannes Muehleisen hannes@cwi.nl in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=d5baebc17f07

Changeset description:

Test for Bug #3512
(grafted from 659ff3ba93e7204761cba67a4222932ad168c0f9)

Comment 19939

Date: 2014-07-31 10:59:01 +0200
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset f342e140e65a made by Hannes Muehleisen hannes@cwi.nl in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=f342e140e65a

Changeset description:

Update for test case for Bug #3512, there is more to this

Comment 19993

Date: 2014-08-06 22:11:26 +0200
From: @njnes

the string 9999.00 != 9999, ie what is the expected result. I agree the error message is incorrect.

Comment 19994

Date: 2014-08-07 09:21:09 +0200
From: @hannesmuehleisen

Niels, see sql/test/BugTracker-2014/Tests/stringfloatshtcompare.Bug-3512.sql for more details on what is going wrong...

Comment 19995

Date: 2014-08-07 09:29:33 +0200
From: @njnes

other db's also have problems with this string in ( integer list ) expression.

Comment 20276

Date: 2014-10-09 20:54:51 +0200
From: @njnes

fixed compare operator to be more type critical

Comment 20277

Date: 2014-10-09 20:55:09 +0200
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset 7d21147d3306 made by Niels Nes niels@cwi.nl in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=7d21147d3306

Changeset description:

fixed stringfloatshtcompare Bug #3512

Comment 20404

Date: 2014-10-31 14:15:04 +0100
From: @sjoerdmullender

Oct2014 has been released.