Dmitry Yemanov wrote:

>My opinion is that this behaviour is incorrect and not standard compliant.
>Even its existence for 10 years is not a good excuse.
>

But it is a good excuse. If you want to work on a database without
legacy or mistakes, start your own. But then you won't have any users.
If want to work on a database system that has users, you have to respect
their investment, even their investment in ugly, inefficient
workarounds. I agree that your idea is better than Borlands (after all,
it was my original idea as well). OK, Borland screwed a lot of users
when they went to version 4 that was substantially incompatible with
version 3. And the vast majority of pre-Borland Unix customers left for
other products. Why? Not because version 4 was better or worse than
version 3, but because it contained a large number of arbitrary
incompatibilites. And if they were going to have to convert running
systems anyway, they might as well convert to systems supported by
companies that respective their customer's investments.

If you want to play in the software business, you must accept that
breaking working production systems because you have a better idea
doesn't work. It doesn't mean that your idea isn't better, it just
means that better doesn't trump working.

Ann's solution of adding a keyword to create view is backwards
compatible, solves the problem, has minimal impact, and is trivial to
implement (unless we've run out of flags in RDB$RELATIONS).