Re: NVL changing data type of a datetime?

The 9.40 manual has exactly the same explanation of NVL, which is
pretty vague, but I agree that the new 9.40 UC7 behaviour seems "more
correct".

I've played some more with datetimes and also char columns and it seems
to me that the "old" behaviour of NVL with datetimes is anomolous.

With chars, the data type returned is that of the longest argument,
i.e. NVLing a char(3) and a char(5) always gives you a char(5) value -
no matter which way round the arguments are and no matter which is null
or not. This is consistent with all versions of Informix I've tried.

On the other hand, with datetimes (for all versions I've tried apart
from 9.40.UC7), the data type returned is that of the first argument.
IDS 9.40.UC7 behaves the same way as it does for chars, i.e. it takes
the higher precision data type.

Although the 9.40 UC7 way seems better, it does mess up our code. I'm
trying to get my hands on an installation of the latest 10.0 server to
see if that has the new or old behaviour.

.

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