another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
as those for inherited columns; that is, it's no longer allowed for a child
table to not have a check constraint matching one that exists on a parent.
This satisfies the principle of least surprise (rows selected from the parent
will always appear to meet its check constraints) and eliminates some
longstanding bogosity in pg_dump, which formerly had to guess about whether
check constraints were really inherited or not.
The implementation involves adding conislocal and coninhcount columns to
pg_constraint (paralleling attislocal and attinhcount in pg_attribute)
and refactoring various ALTER TABLE actions to be more like those for
columns.
Alex Hunsaker, Nikhil Sontakke, Tom Lane
rules to be defined with different, per session controllable, behaviors
for replication purposes.
This will allow replication systems like Slony-I and, as has been stated
on pgsql-hackers, other products to control the firing mechanism of
triggers and rewrite rules without modifying the system catalog directly.
The firing mechanisms are controlled by a new superuser-only GUC
variable, session_replication_role, together with a change to
pg_trigger.tgenabled and a new column pg_rewrite.ev_enabled. Both
columns are a single char data type now (tgenabled was a bool before).
The possible values in these attributes are:
'O' - Trigger/Rule fires when session_replication_role is "origin"
(default) or "local". This is the default behavior.
'D' - Trigger/Rule is disabled and fires never
'A' - Trigger/Rule fires always regardless of the setting of
session_replication_role
'R' - Trigger/Rule fires when session_replication_role is "replica"
The GUC variable can only be changed as long as the system does not have
any cached query plans. This will prevent changing the session role and
accidentally executing stored procedures or functions that have plans
cached that expand to the wrong query set due to differences in the rule
firing semantics.
The SQL syntax for changing a triggers/rules firing semantics is
ALTER TABLE <tabname> <when> TRIGGER|RULE <name>;
<when> ::= ENABLE | ENABLE ALWAYS | ENABLE REPLICA | DISABLE
psql's \d command as well as pg_dump are extended in a backward
compatible fashion.
Jan
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".
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.
the DROP pass rather than the ADD_CONSTR pass. On examining the code I
think this was just an oversight rather than intentional, and it seems
to satisfy the principle of least surprise better than the alternative
solution that was discussed. Add an example to the ref page showing how
to do ALTER TYPE and update the default in one command. Per gripe from
Markus Bertheau that that wasn't possible.
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
DROP CONSTRAINT
This form drops constraints on a table. Currently, constraints on tables
are not required to have unique names, so there may be more than one
constraint matching the specified name. All matching constraints will be
dropped.
To my knowledge, it is no longer possible to create constraints with the
same name for the same relation. When you create a constraint and specify
the same name explictly, an error is raised. Implicit constraint creation
won't choose an existing name either and up to now you could not rename a
constraint. Renaming works with the patch I sent in a few hours ago but this
patch as well won't allow constraints with identical names on the same
relation.
The attached patch thus removes the note in the docs.
Joachim Wieland
This was not especially critical before, but it is now that we track
ownership dependencies --- the dependency for the rowtype *must* shift
to the new owner. Spotted by Bernd Helmle.
Also fix a problem introduced by recent change to allow non-superusers
to do ALTER OWNER in some cases: if the table had a toast table, ALTER
OWNER failed *even for superusers*, because the test being applied would
conclude that the new would-be owner had no create rights on pg_toast.
A side-effect of the fix is to disallow changing the ownership of indexes
or toast tables separately from their parent table, which seems a good
idea on the whole.
at the top level of the column's old default expression before adding
an implicit coercion to the new column type. This seems to satisfy the
principle of least surprise, as per discussion of bug #1290.
* ALTER ... ADD COLUMN with defaults and NOT NULL constraints works per SQL
spec. A default is implemented by rewriting the table with the new value
stored in each row.
* ALTER COLUMN TYPE. You can change a column's datatype to anything you
want, so long as you can specify how to convert the old value. Rewrites
the table. (Possible future improvement: optimize no-op conversions such
as varchar(N) to varchar(N+1).)
* Multiple ALTER actions in a single ALTER TABLE command. You can perform
any number of column additions, type changes, and constraint additions with
only one pass over the table contents.
Basic documentation provided in ALTER TABLE ref page, but some more docs
work is needed.
Original patch from Rod Taylor, additional work from Tom Lane.
remove separate implementation of ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS in favor
of doing a regular DROP. Also, cause CREATE TABLE to account completely
correctly for the inheritance status of the OID column. This fixes
problems with dropping OID columns that have dependencies, as noted by
Christopher Kings-Lynne, as well as making sure that you can't drop an
OID column that was inherited from a parent.
proposal for eventually deprecating OIDs on user tables that I posted
earlier to pgsql-hackers. pg_dump now always specifies WITH OIDS or
WITHOUT OIDS when dumping a table. The documentation has been updated.
Neil Conway
- more work from the SGML police
- some grammar improvements: rewriting a paragraph or two, replacing
contractions where (IMHO) appropriate
- fix missing utility commands in lock mode docs
- improve CLUSTER, REINDEX, SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION ref pages
Neil Conway
On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 21:59, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> I agree. I want to remove OIDs from heaps of our tables when we go to 7.3.
> I'd rather not have to do it in the dump due to down time.
Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>
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
> > This patch improves the documentation of the UPDATE and ALTER TABLE
> > commands to elaborate on the effect of specifying an "ONLY" clause.
>
> Unfortunately this is still only half the truth ... see the
> SQL_INHERITANCE configuration variable.
Okay, I've attached an updated patch with more information on
SQL_INHERITANCE and inheritance behavior in prior releases.
Neil Conway
code review by Tom Lane. Remaining issues: functions that take or
return tuple types are likely to break if one drops (or adds!)
a column in the table defining the type. Need to think about what
to do here.
Along the way: some code review for recent COPY changes; mark system
columns attnotnull = true where appropriate, per discussion a month ago.
attstattarget to indicate 'use the default'. The default is now a GUC
variable default_statistics_target, and so may be changed on the fly. Along
the way we gain the ability to have pg_dump dump the per-column statistics
target when it's not the default. Patch by Neil Conway, with some kibitzing
from Tom Lane.
pg_relcheck is gone; CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, and FOREIGN KEY
constraints all have real live entries in pg_constraint. pg_depend
exists, and RESTRICT/CASCADE options work on most kinds of DROP;
however, pg_depend is not yet very well populated with dependencies.
(Most of the ones that are present at this point just replace formerly
hardwired associations, such as the implicit drop of a relation's pg_type
entry when the relation is dropped.) Need to add more logic to create
dependency entries, improve pg_dump to dump constraints in place of
indexes and triggers, and add some regression tests.
The attached patch allows views to have default values. You can't
specify a default value within a CREATE VIEW statement, it must be
done using ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET DEFAULT after the
view has already been created. Most of the hard work was done by
Tom Lane, I just patched pg_dump and updated the documentation.
Neil Conway <neilconway@rogers.com>
capabilities of specifying time zones as intervals per SQL9x.
Put refentrytitle contents on the same line as the tag.
Otherwise, leading whitespace is propagated into the product, which
(at least) messes up the ToC layout.
Remove (some) docinfo tags containing dates. Best to omit if the dates
are not accurate; maybe use CVS dates instead or leave them out.
(current as of a few hours ago.)
This patch:
1. Adds PG_GETARG_xxx_P_SLICE() macros and associated support routines.
2. Adds routines in src/backend/access/tuptoaster.c for fetching only
necessary chunks of a toasted value. (Modelled on latest changes to
assume chunks are returned in order).
3. Amends text_substr and bytea_substr to use new methods. It now
handles multibyte cases -and should still lead to a performance
improvement in the multibyte case where the substring is near the
beginning of the string.
4. Added new command: ALTER TABLE tabname ALTER COLUMN colname SET
STORAGE {PLAIN | EXTERNAL | EXTENDED | MAIN} to parser and documented in
alter-table.sgml. (NB I used ColId as the item type for the storage
mode string, rather than a new production - I hope this makes sense!).
All this does is sets attstorage for the specified column.
4. AlterTableAlterColumnStatistics is now AlterTableAlterColumnFlags and
handles both statistics and storage (it uses the subtype code to
distinguish). The previous version of my patch also re-arranged other
code in backend/commands/command.c but I have dropped that from this
patch.(I plan to return to it separately).
5. Documented new macros (and also the PG_GETARG_xxx_P_COPY macros) in
xfunc.sgml. ref/alter_table.sgml also contains documentation for ALTER
COLUMN SET STORAGE.
John Gray
primary keys after the fact!
Also, we need to add regression tests for alter table / add primary key
and alter table / drop constraint. These shouldn't be added until 7.3
tho
methinks...
Chris
transformAlterStmt() use these routines, instead of having lots of
duplicate (not to mention should-have-been-duplicate) code.
Adding a column with a CHECK constraint actually works now,
and the tests to reject unsupported DEFAULT and NOT NULL clauses
actually fire now. ALTER TABLE ADD PRIMARY KEY works, modulo
having to have created the column(s) NOT NULL already.
table creation time. Big deal you say - but this patch is the basis of the
next thing which is adding PRIMARY KEYs after table creation time. (Which
is currently impossible without twiddling catalogs)
Rundown
-------
* I have made the makeObjectName function of analyze.c non-static, and
exported it in analyze.h
* I have included analyze.h and defrem.h into command.c, to support
makingObjectNames and creating indices
* I removed the 'case CONSTR_PRIMARY' clause so that it properly fails and
says you can't add primary keys, rather than just doing nothing and
reporting nothing!!!
* I have modified the docs.
Algorithm
---------
* If name specified is null, search for a new valid constraint name. I'm
not sure if I should "lock" my generated name somehow tho - should I open
the relation before doing this step?
* Open relation in access exclusive mode
* Check that the constraint does not already exist
* Define the new index
* Warn if they're doubling up on an existing index
Christopher Kings-Lynne
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
not all of them attached properly in the post I made a few minutes
ago. Please disregard those earlier files. The diffs in the tar file
replace them.
Pierce Tyler
and revert documentation to describe the existing INHERITS clause
instead, per recent discussion in pghackers. Also fix implementation
of SQL_inheritance SET variable: it is not cool to look at this var
during the initial parsing phase, only during parse_analyze(). See
recent bug report concerning misinterpretation of date constants just
after a SET TIMEZONE command. gram.y really has to be an invariant
transformation of the query string to a raw parsetree; anything that
can vary with time must be done during parse analysis.
Initdb help correction
Changed end/abort to commit/rollback and changed related notices
Commented out way old printing functions in libpq
Fixed a typo in alter table / alter column
traced this back to what I believe is an error in the sgml file used to
generate this comment, found in pgsql/doc/src/sgml/ref/alter_table.sgml.
Stephen Birch
No big deal; fixed lots of other markup at the same time.
Bigest change: make sure there is no whitespace
in front of <term> contents.
This will probably help the other output types too.
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Neil Conway
Bruce Momjian
Jan Wieck
PostgreSQL Daemon
Thomas G. Lockhart
Tatsuo Ishii