cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator families". While most
families are equivalent to a single class, related classes can be grouped
into one family to represent the fact that they are semantically compatible.
Cross-type operators are now naturally adjunct parts of a family, without
having to wedge them into a particular opclass as we had done originally.
This commit restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of the work
needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come later. Also,
there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands; the only way
to create a new family right now is to allow CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make
one by default. I owe some more documentation work, too. But that can all
be done in smaller pieces once this infrastructure is in place.
Most of the changes add the mandatory USING clause to DROP OPERATOR
CLASS statements. DROP TYPE is now DROP TYPE CASCADE; without
CASCADE a DROP TYPE fails due to the circular dependency on the
type's I/O functions. The DROP FUNCTION statements for the I/O
functions have been removed, as DROP TYPE CASCADE removes them
automatically. Patch from Michael Fuhr.
Tom Lane
Teodor Sigaev
Neil Conway
Peter Eisentraut