The new format accepts exactly the same data as the json type. However, it is
stored in a format that does not require reparsing the orgiginal text in order
to process it, making it much more suitable for indexing and other operations.
Insignificant whitespace is discarded, and the order of object keys is not
preserved. Neither are duplicate object keys kept - the later value for a given
key is the only one stored.
The new type has all the functions and operators that the json type has,
with the exception of the json generation functions (to_json, json_agg etc.)
and with identical semantics. In addition, there are operator classes for
hash and btree indexing, and two classes for GIN indexing, that have no
equivalent in the json type.
This feature grew out of previous work by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev, which
was intended to provide similar facilities to a nested hstore type, but which
in the end proved to have some significant compatibility issues.
Authors: Oleg Bartunov, Teodor Sigaev, Peter Geoghegan and Andrew Dunstan.
Review: Andres Freund
word comes before the weight instead of after. This will allow future
binary-compatible extension of the representation to support compact formats,
as discussed on pgsql-hackers around 2007/06/18. The reason to do it now is
that we've already pretty well broken any chance of simple in-place upgrade
from 8.2 to 8.3, but it's possible that 8.3 to 8.4 (or whenever we get around
to squeezing NUMERIC) could otherwise be data-compatible.
Get rid of VARATT_SIZE and VARATT_DATA, which were simply redundant with
VARSIZE and VARDATA, and as a consequence almost no code was using the
longer names. Rename the length fields of struct varlena and various
derived structures to catch anyplace that was accessing them directly;
and clean up various places so caught. In itself this patch doesn't
change any behavior at all, but it is necessary infrastructure if we hope
to play any games with the representation of varlena headers.
Greg Stark and Tom Lane
some of the algorithms for higher functions. I see about a factor of ten
speedup on the 'numeric' regression test, but it's unlikely that that test
is representative of real-world applications.
initdb forced due to change of on-disk representation for NUMERIC.
so that precision of result is always at least as good as you'd get from
float8 arithmetic (ie, always at least 16 digits of accuracy). Per
pg_hackers discussion a few days ago.
There's now only one transition value and transition function.
NULL handling in aggregates is a lot cleaner. Also, use Numeric
accumulators instead of integer accumulators for sum/avg on integer
datatypes --- this avoids overflow at the cost of being a little slower.
Implement VARIANCE() and STDDEV() aggregates in the standard backend.
Also, enable new LIKE selectivity estimators by default. Unrelated
change, but as long as I had to force initdb anyway...
