Date: 2014-07-25 12:00:13 +0200
From: Martin van Dinther <<martin.van.dinther>>
To: SQL devs <>
Version: -- development

Last updated: 2019-04-30 12:36:02 +0200

Comment 19927

Date: 2014-07-25 12:00:13 +0200
From: Martin van Dinther <<martin.van.dinther>>

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0
Build Identifier:

For compatibility with other SQL DBMSes it would be nice to have support for function LN(num).

The LN function returns the natural logarithm of a number, which is the power to which you would need to raise the mathematical constant e (approximately 2.718281) in order to get the number in question as the result.

SQL2003 Syntax: LN( expression )

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

1. start mserver5
2. start mclient
3. enter: select ln(20);

Actual Results:

sql>select ln(20);
SELECT: no such unary operator 'ln(tinyint)'

Expected Results:

sql>select ln(20);
+------------------+
| log_single_value |
+==================+
| 2.99573231 |
+------------------+

Currently MonetDB supports log(num) which returns the natural logarithm of a number. However in PostgreSQL log(num) is implemented to return base 10 logarithm. See http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/functions-math.htmlFUNCTIONS-MATH-FUNC-TABLE

This will cause migration (PostgreSQL -> MonetDB) issues.
By adding support for LN(num) at least that scalar function will not have to be converted to MonetDB log() function.

Comment 26849

Date: 2019-01-24 16:25:57 +0100
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset 9cb052c21919 made by Sjoerd Mullender sjoerd@acm.org in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see https//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=9cb052c21919

Changeset description:

Implemented function ln as alias for function log.
Fixes bug #3520.