so that their elements are always taken as simple expressions over the
query's input columns. It originally seemed like a good idea to make them
act exactly like GROUP BY and ORDER BY, right down to the SQL92-era behavior
of accepting output column names or numbers. However, that was not such a
great idea, for two reasons:
1. It permits circular references, as exhibited in bug #5018: the output
column could be the one containing the window function itself. (We actually
had a regression test case illustrating this, but nobody thought twice about
how confusing that would be.)
2. It doesn't seem like a good idea for, eg, "lead(foo) OVER (ORDER BY foo)"
to potentially use two completely different meanings for "foo".
Accordingly, narrow down the behavior of window clauses to use only the
SQL99-compliant interpretation that the expressions are simple expressions.
patch. This includes the ability to force the frame to cover the whole
partition, and the ability to make the frame end exactly on the current row
rather than its last ORDER BY peer. Supporting any more of the full SQL
frame-clause syntax will require nontrivial hacking on the window aggregate
code, so it'll have to wait for 8.5 or beyond.
directly to all the member expressions, instead of the previous implementation
where the ARRAY[] constructor would infer a common element type and then we'd
coerce the finished array after the fact. This has a number of benefits,
one being that we can allow an empty ARRAY[] construct so long as its
element type is specified by such a cast.
Brendan Jurd, minor fixes by me.
from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions. These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.
The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible. This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.
This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation. Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
and views (but not system catalogs, nor sequences or toast tables). Get rid
of the hardwired convention that a type's array type is named exactly "_type",
instead using a new column pg_type.typarray to provide the linkage. (It still
will be named "_type", though, except in odd corner cases such as
maximum-length type names.)
Along the way, make tracking of owner and schema dependencies for types more
uniform: a type directly created by the user has these dependencies, while a
table rowtype or auto-generated array type does not have them, but depends on
its parent object instead.
David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan, Tom Lane
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".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
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.
will be expanded to a list of their member fields, rather than creating
a nested rowtype field as formerly. (The old behavior is still available
by omitting '.*'.) This syntax is not allowed by the SQL spec AFAICS,
so changing its behavior doesn't violate the spec. The new behavior is
substantially more useful since it allows, for example, triggers to check
for data changes with 'if row(new.*) is distinct from row(old.*)'. Per
my recent proposal.
with main, avoid using a SQL-defined SQLSTATE for what is most definitely
not a SQL-compatible error condition, fix documentation omissions,
adhere to message style guidelines, don't use two GUC_REPORT variables
when one is sufficient. Nothing done about pg_dump issues.
literally.
Add GUC variables:
"escape_string_warning" - warn about backslashes in non-E strings
"escape_string_syntax" - supports E'' syntax?
"standard_compliant_strings" - treats backslashes literally in ''
Update code to use E'' when escapes are used.
eliminating the former hard-wired convention about their names. Allow
pg_cast entries to represent both type coercion and length coercion in
a single step --- this is represented by a function that takes an
extra typmod argument, just like a length coercion function. This
nicely merges the type and length coercion mechanisms into something
at least a little cleaner than we had before. Make use of the single-
coercion-step behavior to fix integer-to-bit coercion so that coercing
to bit(n) yields the rightmost n bits of the integer instead of the
leftmost n bits. This should fix recurrent complaints about the odd
behavior of this coercion. Clean up the documentation of the bit string
functions, and try to put it where people might actually find it.
Also, get rid of the unreliable heuristics in ruleutils.c about whether
to display nested coercion steps; instead require parse_coerce.c to
label them properly in the first place.
rather than allowing them only in a few special cases as before. In
particular you can now pass a ROW() construct to a function that accepts
a rowtype parameter. Internal generation of RowExprs fixes a number of
corner cases that used to not work very well, such as referencing the
whole-row result of a JOIN or subquery. This represents a further step in
the work I started a month or so back to make rowtype values into
first-class citizens.
types. Update the regression tests and the documentation to reflect
this. Remove the UNSAFE_FLOATS #ifdef.
This is only half the story: we still unconditionally reject
floating point operations that result in +/- infinity. See
recent thread on -hackers for more information.
character in identifiers. The first change eliminates the current need
to put spaces around parameter references, as in "x<=$2". The second
change improves compatibility with Oracle and some other RDBMSes. This
was discussed and agreed to back in January, but did not get done.
extensions to support our historical behavior. An aggregate belongs
to the closest query level of any of the variables in its argument,
or the current query level if there are no variables (e.g., COUNT(*)).
The implementation involves adding an agglevelsup field to Aggref,
and treating outer aggregates like outer variables at planning time.
Still needs to be filled with more information, but it gives us a
framework to have a User's Guide with complete coverage of the basic
SQL operations. Move arrays into data type chapter, inheritance into
DDL chapter (for now).
Make <comment>s show up in the output while the version number ends in
"devel".
Allow cross-book references with entities &cite-user; etc.
Mention SQL9x precision syntax for date/time types.
Use PostgreSQL consistantly throughout docs. Before, usage was split evenly
between Postgres and PostgreSQL.
the Admin Guide about routine maintenance tasks. Currently this only
discusses the various reasons for doing VACUUM, but perhaps it could be
fleshed out with topics like log rotation.
default, but OIDS are removed from many system catalogs that don't need them.
Some interesting side effects: TOAST pointers are 20 bytes not 32 now;
pg_description has a three-column key instead of one.
Bugs fixed in passing: BINARY cursors work again; pg_class.relhaspkey
has some usefulness; pg_dump dumps comments on indexes, rules, and
triggers in a valid order.
initdb forced.
tests to return the correct results per SQL9x when given NULL inputs.
Reimplement these tests as well as IS [NOT] NULL to have their own
expression node types, instead of depending on special functions.
From Joe Conway, with a little help from Tom Lane.
