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Status Not under consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Db2 for i
Created by Guest
Created on Jul 25, 2017

LISTAGG - Add parameter for length and allow less than 4000

The new LISTAGG function is very convenient. Two things that have us scratching our heads though:
(1) Why does the length have an arbitrary minimum of 4000?
(2) Why is setting a different length done by a CAST of the input instead of just adding a 3rd parameter with the desired length? This would seem a lot cleaner and clearer.


Use Case:

We can think of many places where we can eliminate application code to manually assemble list items with this, but few of them are even close to 4000 characters wide. Example: In a simple list we might want to limit to 80 characters and get the convenient count of truncated items without having to fetch everything into our application and then process it.

The CAST operation to change the length longer is also not intuitive vs. having an explicit parameter and makes the code a lot harder to read.


Idea priority Low
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Dec 8, 2020

    IBM does not intend to provide a solution to this request at this time, so it is being closed.

    LISTAGG as currently implemented aligns with the SQL standard. We do not intend to extend it with non-standard syntax.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Jun 3, 2020

    Another nice use case could be:
    Not only set the length to an individual value, it would be also nice to limit the number of list-entries returned in the string, e.g.
    list only the first 6 entries of the list, based on the ORDER BY-expression AND use the ON OVERFLOW-clause to indicate that more entries exists.