For a very long time, one of the parser's heuristics for resolving
ambiguous operator calls has been to assume that unknown-type literals are
of the same type as the other input (if it's known). However, this was
only used in the first step of quickly checking for an exact-types match,
and thus did not help in resolving matches that require coercion, such as
matches to polymorphic operators. As we add more polymorphic operators,
this becomes more of a problem. This patch adds another use of the same
heuristic as a last-ditch check before failing to resolve an ambiguous
operator or function call. In particular this will let us define the range
inclusion operator in a less limited way (to come in a follow-on patch).
Remove crude hack that tried to propagate collation through a
function-returning-record, ie, from the function's arguments to individual
fields selected from its result record. That is just plain inconsistent,
because the function result is composite and cannot have a collation;
and there's no hope of making this kind of action-at-a-distance work
consistently. Adjust regression test cases that expected this to happen.
Meanwhile, the behavior of casting to a domain with a declared collation
stays the same as it was, since that seemed to be the consensus.
All expression nodes now have an explicit output-collation field, unless
they are known to only return a noncollatable data type (such as boolean
or record). Also, nodes that can invoke collation-aware functions store
a separate field that is the collation value to pass to the function.
This avoids confusion that arises when a function has collatable inputs
and noncollatable output type, or vice versa.
Also, replace the parser's on-the-fly collation assignment method with
a post-pass over the completed expression tree. This allows us to use
a more complex (and hopefully more nearly spec-compliant) assignment
rule without paying for it in extra storage in every expression node.
Fix assorted bugs in the planner's handling of collations by making
collation one of the defining properties of an EquivalenceClass and
by converting CollateExprs into discardable RelabelType nodes during
expression preprocessing.
The initial collations patch treated a COLLATE spec as part of a TypeName,
following what can only be described as brain fade on the part of the SQL
committee. It's a lot more reasonable to treat COLLATE as a syntactically
separate object, so that it can be added in only the productions where it
actually belongs, rather than needing to reject it in a boatload of places
where it doesn't belong (something the original patch mostly failed to do).
In addition this change lets us meet the spec's requirement to allow
COLLATE anywhere in the clauses of a ColumnDef, and it avoids unfriendly
behavior for constructs such as "foo::type COLLATE collation".
To do this, pull collation information out of TypeName and put it in
ColumnDef instead, thus reverting most of the collation-related changes in
parse_type.c's API. I made one additional structural change, which was to
use a ColumnDef as an intermediate node in AT_AlterColumnType AlterTableCmd
nodes. This provides enough room to get rid of the "transform" wart in
AlterTableCmd too, since the ColumnDef can carry the USING expression
easily enough.
Also fix some other minor bugs that have crept in in the same areas,
like failure to copy recently-added fields of ColumnDef in copyfuncs.c.
While at it, document the formerly secret ability to specify a collation
in ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN TYPE, ALTER TYPE ADD ATTRIBUTE, and
ALTER TYPE ALTER ATTRIBUTE TYPE; and correct some misstatements about
what the default collation selection will be when COLLATE is omitted.
BTW, the three-parameter form of format_type() should go away too,
since it just contributes to the confusion in this area; but I'll do
that in a separate patch.
This adds collation support for columns and domains, a COLLATE clause
to override it per expression, and B-tree index support.
Peter Eisentraut
reviewed by Pavel Stehule, Itagaki Takahiro, Robert Haas, Noah Misch
PG 8.4 added a built-in feature for casting pretty much any data type to
string types (text, varchar, etc). We allowed this to work in any of the
historically-allowed syntaxes: CAST(x AS text), x::text, text(x), or
x.text. However, multiple complaints have shown that it's too easy to
invoke such casts unintentionally in the latter two styles, particularly
field selection. To cure the problem with the narrowest possible change
of behavior, disallow use of I/O conversion casts from composite types to
string types via functional/attribute syntax. The new functionality is
still available via cast syntax.
In passing, document the equivalence of functional and attribute syntax
in a more visible place.
matching a call like f(x, ORDER BY y,z). It could be that what the user
really wants is f(x,z ORDER BY y). We now have pretty conclusive evidence
that many people won't understand this problem without concrete guidance,
so give it to them. Per further discussion of the string_agg() problem.
look through join alias Vars to avoid breaking join queries, and
move the test to someplace where it will catch more possible ways
of calling a function. We still ought to throw away the whole thing
in favor of a data-type-based solution, but that's not feasible in
the back branches.
This needs to be back-patched further than 9.0, but I don't have time
to do so today. Committing now so that the fix gets into 9.0beta4.
"val AS name" to "name := val", as per recent discussion.
This patch catches everything in the original named-parameters patch,
but I'm not certain that no other dependencies snuck in later (grepping
the source tree for all uses of AS soon proved unworkable).
In passing I note that we've dropped the ball at least once on keeping
ecpg's lexer (as opposed to parser) in sync with the backend. It would
be a good idea to go through all of pgc.l and see if it's in sync now.
I didn't attempt that at the moment.
to transformAggregateCall, instead of abusing fields in Aggref to carry them
temporarily. No change in functionality but hopefully the code is a bit
clearer now. Per gripe from Gokulakannan Somasundaram.
The purpose of this change is to eliminate the need for every caller
of SearchSysCache, SearchSysCacheCopy, SearchSysCacheExists,
GetSysCacheOid, and SearchSysCacheList to know the maximum number
of allowable keys for a syscache entry (currently 4). This will
make it far easier to increase the maximum number of keys in a
future release should we choose to do so, and it makes the code
shorter, too.
Design and review by Tom Lane.
non-kluge method for controlling the order in which values are fed to an
aggregate function. At the same time eliminate the old implementation
restriction that DISTINCT was only supported for single-argument aggregates.
Possibly release-notable behavioral change: formerly, agg(DISTINCT x)
dropped null values of x unconditionally. Now, it does so only if the
agg transition function is strict; otherwise nulls are treated as DISTINCT
normally would, ie, you get one copy.
Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada
recent proposal. As proof of concept, remove knowledge of Params from the
core parser, arranging for them to be handled entirely by parser hook
functions. It turns out we need an additional hook for that --- I had
forgotten about the code that handles inferring a parameter's type from
context.
This is a preliminary step towards letting plpgsql handle its variables
through parser hooks. Additional work remains to be done to expose the
facility through SPI, but I think this is all the changes needed in the core
parser.
by extending the ereport() API to cater for pluralization directly. This
is better than the original method of calling ngettext outside the elog.c
code because (1) it avoids double translation, which wastes cycles and in
the worst case could give a wrong result; and (2) it avoids having to use
a different coding method in PL code than in the core backend. The
client-side uses of ngettext are not touched since neither of these concerns
is very pressing in the client environment. Per my proposal of yesterday.
find_inheritance_children() and find_all_inheritors(). I got annoyed that
these are buried inside the planner but mostly used elsewhere. So, create
a new file catalog/pg_inherits.c and put them there, along with a couple
of other functions that search pg_inherits.
The code that modifies pg_inherits is (still) in tablecmds.c --- it's
kind of entangled with unrelated code that modifies pg_depend and other
stuff, so pulling it out seemed like a bigger change than I wanted to make
right now. But this file provides a natural home for it if anyone ever
gets around to that.
This commit just moves code around; it doesn't change anything, except
I succumbed to the temptation to make a couple of trivial optimizations
in typeInheritsFrom().
In the backend, I changed only a handful of exemplary or important-looking
instances to make use of the plural support; there is probably more work
there. For the rest of the source, this should cover all relevant cases.
most node types used in expression trees (both before and after parse
analysis). This allows us to place an error cursor in many situations
where we formerly could not, because the information wasn't available
beyond the very first level of parse analysis. There's a fair amount
of work still to be done to persuade individual ereport() calls to actually
include an error location, but this gets the initdb-forcing part of the
work out of the way; and the situation is already markedly better than
before for complaints about unimplementable implicit casts, such as
CASE and UNION constructs with incompatible alternative data types.
Per my proposal of a few days ago.
into nodes/nodeFuncs, so as to reduce wanton cross-subsystem #includes inside
the backend. There's probably more that should be done along this line,
but this is a start anyway.
with system catalog lookups, as was foreseen to be necessary almost since
their creation. Instead put the information into two new pg_type columns,
typcategory and typispreferred. Add support for setting these when
creating a user-defined base type.
The category column is just a "char" (i.e. a poor man's enum), allowing
a crude form of user extensibility of the category list: just use an
otherwise-unused character. This seems sufficient for foreseen uses,
but we could upgrade to having an actual category catalog someday, if
there proves to be a huge demand for custom type categories.
In this patch I have attempted to hew exactly to the behavior of the
previous hardwired logic, except for introducing new type categories for
arrays, composites, and enums. In particular the default preferred state
for user-defined types remains TRUE. That seems worth revisiting, but it
should be done as a separate patch from introducing the infrastructure.
Likewise, any adjustment of the standard set of categories should be done
separately.
so long as all the trailing arguments are of the same (non-array) type.
The function receives them as a single array argument (which is why they
have to all be the same type).
It might be useful to extend this facility to aggregates, but this patch
doesn't do that.
This patch imposes a noticeable slowdown on function lookup --- a follow-on
patch will fix that by adding a redundant column to pg_proc.
Pavel Stehule
checking of argument compatibility right; although the problem is only exposed
with multiple-input aggregates in which some arguments are polymorphic and
some are not. Per bug #3852 from Sokolov Yura.
even in code paths where we don't pay any subsequent attention to the typmod
value. This seems needed in view of the fact that 8.3's generalized typmod
support will accept a lot of bogus syntax, such as "timestamp(foo)" or
"record(int, 42)" --- if we allow such things to pass without comment,
users will get confused. Per a recent example from Greg Stark.
To implement this in a way that's not very vulnerable to future
bugs-of-omission, refactor the API of parse_type.c's TypeName lookup routines
so that typmod validation is folded into the base lookup operation. Callers
can still choose not to receive the encoded typmod, but we'll check the
decoration anyway if it's present.
were accepted by prior Postgres releases. This takes care of the loose end
left by the preceding patch to downgrade implicit casts-to-text. To avoid
breaking desirable behavior for array concatenation, introduce a new
polymorphic pseudo-type "anynonarray" --- the added concatenation operators
are actually text || anynonarray and anynonarray || text.
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
seen by code inspecting the expression. The best way to do this seems
to be to drop the original representation as a function invocation, and
instead make a special expression node type that represents applying
the element-type coercion function to each array element. In this way
the element function is exposed and will be checked for volatility.
Per report from Guillaume Smet.
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.
CREATE AGGREGATE aggname (input_type) (parameter_list)
along with the old syntax where the input type was named in the parameter
list. This fits more naturally with the way that the aggregate is identified
in DROP AGGREGATE and other utility commands; furthermore it has a natural
extension to handle multiple-input aggregates, where the basetype-parameter
method would get ugly. In fact, this commit fixes the grammar and all the
utility commands to support multiple-input aggregates; but DefineAggregate
rejects it because the executor isn't fixed yet.
I didn't do anything about treating agg(*) as a zero-input aggregate instead
of artificially making it a one-input aggregate, but that should be considered
in combination with supporting multi-input aggregates.
during parse analysis, not only errors detected in the flex/bison stages.
This is per my earlier proposal. This commit includes all the basic
infrastructure, but locations are only tracked and reported for errors
involving column references, function calls, and operators. More could
be done later but this seems like a good set to start with. I've also
moved the ReportSyntaxErrorPosition logic out of psql and into libpq,
which should make it available to more people --- even within psql this
is an improvement because warnings weren't handled by ReportSyntaxErrorPosition.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
argument list contains parameter symbols ($n) declared as type VOID,
discard these arguments. This allows the driver to avoid renumbering
mixed IN and OUT argument placeholders (the JDBC syntax involves writing
? for both IN and OUT parameters, but on the server side we don't think
that OUT parameters are arguments). This doesn't break any currently-
useful cases since VOID is not used as an input argument type.
As I pointed out a few days ago, this code has failed to do anything useful
for some time ... and if we did want to revive the capability to select
functions by nearness of inheritance ancestry, this is the wrong place
and way to do it anyway. The knowledge would need to go into
func_select_candidate() instead. Perhaps someday someone will be motivated
to do that, but I am not today.
indexes. Replace all heap_openr and index_openr calls by heap_open
and index_open. Remove runtime lookups of catalog OID numbers in
various places. Remove relcache's support for looking up system
catalogs by name. Bulky but mostly very boring patch ...
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
should recognize 'foo.*' when the star appears in A_Indirection, not only
in ColumnRef. This allows 'SELECT something.*' to do what the user
expects when the something is an expression yielding a row.
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.
In the past, we used a 'Lispy' linked list implementation: a "list" was
merely a pointer to the head node of the list. The problem with that
design is that it makes lappend() and length() linear time. This patch
fixes that problem (and others) by maintaining a count of the list
length and a pointer to the tail node along with each head node pointer.
A "list" is now a pointer to a structure containing some meta-data
about the list; the head and tail pointers in that structure refer
to ListCell structures that maintain the actual linked list of nodes.
The function names of the list API have also been changed to, I hope,
be more logically consistent. By default, the old function names are
still available; they will be disabled-by-default once the rest of
the tree has been updated to use the new API names.
results with tuples as ordinary varlena Datums. This commit does not
in itself do much for us, except eliminate the horrid memory leak
associated with evaluation of whole-row variables. However, it lays the
groundwork for allowing composite types as table columns, and perhaps
some other useful features as well. Per my proposal of a few days ago.
pointer type when it is not necessary to do so.
For future reference, casting NULL to a pointer type is only necessary
when (a) invoking a function AND either (b) the function has no prototype
OR (c) the function is a varargs function.
pghackers proposal of 8-Nov. All the existing cross-type comparison
operators (int2/int4/int8 and float4/float8) have appropriate support.
The original proposal of storing the right-hand-side datatype as part of
the primary key for pg_amop and pg_amproc got modified a bit in the event;
it is easier to store zero as the 'default' case and only store a nonzero
when the operator is actually cross-type. Along the way, remove the
long-since-defunct bigbox_ops operator class.
Remove the 'strategy map' code, which was a large amount of mechanism
that no longer had any use except reverse-mapping from procedure OID to
strategy number. Passing the strategy number to the index AM in the
first place is simpler and faster.
This is a preliminary step in planned support for cross-datatype index
operations. I'm committing it now since the ScanKeyEntryInitialize()
API change touches quite a lot of files, and I want to commit those
changes before the tree drifts under me.
This is no longer necessary or appropriate since we don't use zero typeid
as a wildcard anymore, and it fixes a nasty performance problem with
functions with many parameters. Per recent example from Reuven Lerner.
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.
blanks, in hopes of reducing the surprise factor for newbies. Remove
redundant operators for VARCHAR (it depends wholly on TEXT operations now).
Clean up resolution of ambiguous operators/functions to avoid surprising
choices for domains: domains are treated as equivalent to their base types
and binary-coercibility is no longer considered a preference item when
choosing among multiple operators/functions. IsBinaryCoercible now correctly
reflects the notion that you need *only* relabel the type to get from type
A to type B: that is, a domain is binary-coercible to its base type, but
not vice versa. Various marginal cleanup, including merging the essentially
duplicate resolution code in parse_func.c and parse_oper.c. Improve opr_sanity
regression test to understand about binary compatibility (using pg_cast),
and fix a couple of small errors in the catalogs revealed thereby.
Restructure "special operator" handling to fetch operators via index opclasses
rather than hardwiring assumptions about names (cleans up the pattern_ops
stuff a little).
that the types of untyped string-literal constants are deduced (ie,
when coerce_type is applied to 'em, that's what the type must be).
Remove the ancient hack of storing the input Param-types array as a
global variable, and put the info into ParseState instead. This touches
a lot of files because of adjustment of routine parameter lists, but
it's really not a large patch. Note: PREPARE statement still insists on
exact specification of parameter types, but that could easily be relaxed
now, if we wanted to do so.
rewritten and the protocol is changed, but most elog calls are still
elog calls. Also, we need to contemplate mechanisms for controlling
all this functionality --- eg, how much stuff should appear in the
postmaster log? And what API should libpq expose for it?
expressions, ARRAY(sub-SELECT) expressions, some array functions.
Polymorphic functions using ANYARRAY/ANYELEMENT argument and return
types. Some regression tests in place, documentation is lacking.
Joe Conway, with some kibitzing from Tom Lane.
rid of the assumption that sizeof(Oid)==sizeof(int). This is one small
step towards someday supporting 8-byte OIDs. For the moment, it doesn't
do much except get rid of a lot of unsightly casts.
so that all executable expression nodes inherit from a common supertype
Expr. This is somewhat of an exercise in code purity rather than any
real functional advance, but getting rid of the extra Oper or Func node
formerly used in each operator or function call should provide at least
a little space and speed improvement.
initdb forced by changes in stored-rules representation.
coercions, not implicit ones. For example, 'select abstime(1035497293)'
should succeed because there is an explicit binary coercion from int4
to abstime.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Magnus Hagander
Robert Haas
Alvaro Herrera
PostgreSQL Daemon
Neil Conway