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.
can tell whether it is being used as an aggregate or not. This allows
such a function to avoid re-pallocing a pass-by-reference transition
value; normally it would be unsafe for a function to scribble on an input,
but in the aggregate case it's safe to reuse the old transition value.
Make int8inc() do this. This gets a useful improvement in the speed of
COUNT(*), at least on narrow tables (it seems to be swamped by I/O when
the table rows are wide). Per a discussion in early December with
Neil Conway. I also fixed int_aggregate.c to check this, thereby
turning it into something approaching a supportable technique instead
of being a crude hack.
chapters on extending types, operators, and aggregates into the extending
functions chapter. Move the information on how to call table functions
into the queries chapter. Remove some outdated information that is
already present in a better form in other parts of the documentation.
including:
- replacing all the appropriate usages of <citetitle>PostgreSQL
...</citetitle> with &cite-user;, &cite-admin;, and so on
- fix an omission in the EXECUTE documentation
- add some more text to the EXPLAIN documentation
- improve the PL/PgSQL RETURN NEXT documentation (more work to do here)
- minor markup fixes
Neil Conway
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...
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Peter Eisentraut
Thomas G. Lockhart