[buttercraft]

> The literal definition distinct is

Irrelevant. What matters is the meaning in the context of SQL.

> weird and inconsistent and a waste of time. For all the language bugs due to the existence of null

There are necessary, semantic cases that need to be dealt with. How else would you do it?

Also, it's really weird to use "bugs" to refer to well defined and well documented behavior.

[munk-a]

I wanted to briefly reinforce this point with the fact that SQL has multiple equality operators - there is both `=` and `IS NOT DISTINCT FROM`. The later operator will treat null values as equal in alignment with the `DISTINCT` and `DISTINCT ON` operators.

It is extremely easy using partial uniques and the proper operators to treat nulls as non-distinct values and the approach we have allows some very important functionality that aligns with standard statistical data treatment which was influential to how SQL logic was originally designed.