useful and confuses people who think it is the same as -U. (Eventually
we might want to re-introduce it as being an alias for -U, but that should
not happen until the switch has actually not been there for a few releases.)
Likewise in pg_dump and pg_restore. Per gripe from Robert Treat and
subsequent discussion.
literally, whether quoted or not. Since we allow $ as a character within
identifiers, this behavior is useful, whereas the previous behavior of
treating it as the regexp ending anchor was nearly useless given that the
pattern is automatically anchored anyway. This affects the arguments of
psql's \d commands as well as pg_dump's -n and -t switches. Per discussion.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
reference pages documenting that these commands cannot be used within
a transaction block. Also make some minor improvements to the psql
reference page. Patch from Simon Riggs, minor editorialization by
myself.
queries via a cursor, fetching a limited number of rows at a time and
therefore not risking exhausting memory. A disadvantage of the scheme
is that 'aligned' output mode will align each group of rows independently
leading to odd-looking output, but all the other output formats work
reasonably well. Chris Mair, with some additional hacking by moi.
the opportunity to treat COUNT(*) as a zero-argument aggregate instead
of the old hack that equated it to COUNT(1); this is materially cleaner
(no more weird ANYOID cases) and ought to be at least a tiny bit faster.
Original patch by Sergey Koposov; review, documentation, simple regression
tests, pg_dump and psql support by moi.
to fix regressions introduced in the recent patch adding additional
\connect options. This is based on work by Volkan YAZICI, although
this version of the patch doesn't bear much resemblance to Volkan's
version.
\connect takes 4 optional arguments: database name, user name, host
name, and port number. If any of those parameters are omitted or
specified as "-", the value of that parameter from the previous
connection is used instead; if there is no previous connection,
the libpq default is used. Note that this behavior makes it
impossible to reuse the libpq defaults without quitting psql and
restarting it; I don't really see the use case for needing to do
that.
(optionally) to a new host and port without exiting psql. This
eliminates, IMHO, a surprise in that you can now connect to PostgreSQL
on a differnt machine from the one where you started your session. This
should help people who use psql as an administrative tool.
David Fetter
Andrew Dunstan
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Neil Conway
Alvaro Herrera
Magnus Hagander
Peter Eisentraut