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.
provide just a boolean 'amcanorder', instead of fields that specify the
sort operator strategy numbers. We have decided to require ordering-capable
AMs to use btree-compatible strategy numbers, so the old fields are
overkill (and indeed misleading about what's allowed).
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.
to the existing X-direction tests. An rtree class now includes 4 actual
2-D tests, 4 1-D X-direction tests, and 4 1-D Y-direction tests.
This involved adding four new Y-direction test operators for each of
box and polygon; I followed the PostGIS project's lead as to the names
of these operators.
NON BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE CHANGE: the poly_overleft (&<) and poly_overright
(&>) operators now have semantics comparable to box_overleft and box_overright.
This is necessary to make r-tree indexes work correctly on polygons.
Also, I changed circle_left and circle_right to agree with box_left and
box_right --- formerly they allowed the boundaries to touch. This isn't
actually essential given the lack of any r-tree opclass for circles, but
it seems best to sync all the definitions while we are at it.
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.
an 'opclass owner' column in pg_opclass. Nothing is done with it at
present, but since there are plans to invent a CREATE OPERATOR CLASS
command soon, we'll probably want DROP OPERATOR CLASS too, which
suggests that a notion of ownership would be a good idea.
pgsql-hackers. pg_opclass now has a row for each opclass supported by each
index AM, not a row for each opclass name. This allows pg_opclass to show
directly whether an AM supports an opclass, and furthermore makes it possible
to store additional information about an opclass that might be AM-dependent.
pg_opclass and pg_amop now store "lossy" and "haskeytype" information that we
previously expected the user to remember to provide in CREATE INDEX commands.
Lossiness is no longer an index-level property, but is associated with the
use of a particular operator in a particular index opclass.
Along the way, IndexSupportInitialize now uses the syscaches to retrieve
pg_amop and pg_amproc entries. I find this reduces backend launch time by
about ten percent, at the cost of a couple more special cases in catcache.c's
IndexScanOK.
Initial work by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev, further hacking by Tom Lane.
initdb forced.
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Teodor Sigaev
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Thomas G. Lockhart
Tatsuo Ishii