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".
- Add new SQL command SET XML OPTION (also available via regular GUC) to
control the DOCUMENT vs. CONTENT option in implicit parsing and
serialization operations.
- Subtle corrections in the handling of the standalone property in
xmlroot().
- Allow xmlroot() to work on content fragments.
- Subtle corrections in the handling of the version property in
xmlconcat().
- Code refactoring for producing XML declarations.
FAMILY; and add FAMILY option to CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to allow adding a
class to a pre-existing family. Per previous discussion. Man, what a
tedious lot of cutting and pasting ...
columns procost and prorows, to allow simple user adjustment of the estimated
cost of a function call, as well as control of the estimated number of rows
returned by a set-returning function. We might eventually wish to extend this
to allow function-specific estimation routines, but there seems to be
consensus that we should try a simple constant estimate first. In particular
this provides a relatively simple way to control the order in which different
WHERE clauses are applied in a plan node, which is a Good Thing in view of the
fact that the recent EquivalenceClass planner rewrite made that much less
predictable than before.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
the XmlExpr code in various lists, use a representation that has some hope
of reverse-listing correctly (though it's still a de-escaping function
shy of correctness), generally try to make it look more like Postgres
coding conventions.
in PITR scenarios. We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases. Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId. Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done. Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database. initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs. Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.
the SQL spec, viz IS NULL is true if all the row's fields are null, IS NOT
NULL is true if all the row's fields are not null. The former coding got
this right for a limited number of cases with IS NULL (ie, those where it
could disassemble a ROW constructor at parse time), but was entirely wrong
for IS NOT NULL. Per report from Teodor.
I desisted from changing the behavior for arrays, since on closer inspection
it's not clear that there's any support for that in the SQL spec. This
probably needs more consideration.
of the syntax as this fundamentally dead-end approach can, in particular
combinations of single and multi column assignments. Improve rather
inadequate documentation and provide some regression tests.
by abandoning the idea that it should say SERIAL in the dump. Instead,
dump serial sequences and column defaults just like regular ones.
Add a new backend command ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED BY to let pg_dump recreate
the sequence-to-column dependency that was formerly created "behind the
scenes" by SERIAL. This restores SERIAL to being truly "just a macro"
consisting of component operations that can be stated explicitly in SQL.
Furthermore, the new command allows sequence ownership to be reassigned,
so that old mistakes can be cleaned up.
Also, downgrade the OWNED-BY dependency from INTERNAL to AUTO, since there
is no longer any very compelling argument why the sequence couldn't be
dropped while keeping the column. (This forces initdb, to be sure the
right kinds of dependencies are in there.)
Along the way, add checks to prevent ALTER OWNER or SET SCHEMA on an
owned sequence; you can now only do this indirectly by changing the
owning table's owner or schema. This is an oversight in previous
releases, but probably not worth back-patching.
plpgsql support to come later. Along the way, convert execMain's
SELECT INTO support into a DestReceiver, in order to eliminate some ugly
special cases.
Jonah Harris and Tom Lane
(e.g. "INSERT ... VALUES (...), (...), ...") and elsewhere as allowed
by the spec. (e.g. similar to a FROM clause subselect). initdb required.
Joe Conway and Tom Lane.
created in the bootstrap phase proper, rather than added after-the-fact
by initdb. This is cleaner than before because it allows us to retire the
undocumented ALTER TABLE ... CREATE TOAST TABLE command, but the real reason
I'm doing it is so that toast tables of shared catalogs will now have
predetermined OIDs. This will allow a reasonably clean solution to the
problem of locking tables before we load their relcache entries, to appear
in a forthcoming patch.
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.
discussion (including making def_arg allow reserved words), add missed
opt_definition for UNIQUE case. Put the reloptions support code in a less
random place (I chose to make a new file access/common/reloptions.c).
Eliminate header inclusion creep. Make the index options functions safely
user-callable (seems like client apps might like to be able to test validity
of options before trying to make an index). Reduce overhead for normal case
with no options by allowing rd_options to be NULL. Fix some unmaintainably
klugy code, including getting rid of Natts_pg_class_fixed at long last.
Some stylistic cleanup too, and pay attention to keeping comments in sync
with code.
Documentation still needs work, though I did fix the omissions in
catalogs.sgml and indexam.sgml.
Open items:
There were a few tangentially related issues that have come up that I think
are TODOs. I'm likely to tackle one or two of these next so I'm interested in
hearing feedback on them as well.
. Constraints currently do not know anything about inheritance. Tom suggested
adding a coninhcount and conislocal like attributes have to track their
inheritance status.
. Foreign key constraints currently do not get copied to new children (and
therefore my code doesn't verify them). I don't think it would be hard to
add them and treat them like CHECK constraints.
. No constraints at all are copied to tables defined with LIKE. That makes it
hard to use LIKE to define new partitions. The standard defines LIKE and
specifically says it does not copy constraints. But the standard already has
an option called INCLUDING DEFAULTS; we could always define a non-standard
extension LIKE table INCLUDING CONSTRAINTS that gives the user the option to
request a copy including constraints.
. Personally, I think the whole attislocal thing is bunk. The decision about
whether to drop a column from children tables or not is something that
should be up to the user and trying to DWIM based on whether there was ever
a local definition or the column was acquired purely through inheritance is
hardly ever going to match up with user expectations.
. And of course there's the whole unique and primary key constraint issue. I
think to get any traction at all on this you have a prerequisite of a real
partitioned table implementation where the system knows what the partition
key is so it can recognize when it's a leading part of an index key.
Greg Stark
JOIN, which I removed in a recent fit of over-optimism that we wouldn't
have any future use for it. Now it's needed to support disambiguating
WITH CHECK OPTION from WITH TIME ZONE. As proof of concept, add stub
grammar productions for WITH CHECK OPTION.
support both FOR UPDATE and FOR SHARE in one command, as well as both
NOWAIT and normal WAIT behavior. The more general code is actually
simpler and cleaner.
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.
not likely ever to be implemented seeing it's been removed from SQL2003.
This allows getting rid of the 'filter' version of yylex() that we had in
parser.c, which should save at least a few microseconds in parsing.
creation of a shell type. This allows a less hacky way of dealing with
the mutual dependency between a datatype and its I/O functions: make a
shell type, then make the functions, then define the datatype fully.
We should fix pg_dump to handle things this way, but this commit just deals
with the backend.
Martijn van Oosterhout, with some corrections by Tom Lane.
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Joe Conway
Andrew Dunstan
Neil Conway