Oracle recommends using VARCHAR2 not VARCHAR, allegedly because they might
someday change VARCHAR to be spec-compliant about distinguishing null from
empty string. (I'm not holding my breath, though.) Our examples of PL/SQL
code were using VARCHAR, which while not wrong is missing the pedagogical
opportunity to talk about converting Oracle type names to Postgres. So
switch the examples to use VARCHAR2, and add some text about what to do
with common Oracle type names like VARCHAR2 and NUMBER. (There is probably
more to be said here, but those are the ones I'm sure about offhand.)
Per suggestion from rapg12@gmail.com.
Discussion: <20160521140046.22591.24672@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
The newly added ON CONFLICT clause allows to specify an alternative to
raising a unique or exclusion constraint violation error when inserting.
ON CONFLICT refers to constraints that can either be specified using a
inference clause (by specifying the columns of a unique constraint) or
by naming a unique or exclusion constraint. DO NOTHING avoids the
constraint violation, without touching the pre-existing row. DO UPDATE
SET ... [WHERE ...] updates the pre-existing tuple, and has access to
both the tuple proposed for insertion and the existing tuple; the
optional WHERE clause can be used to prevent an update from being
executed. The UPDATE SET and WHERE clauses have access to the tuple
proposed for insertion using the "magic" EXCLUDED alias, and to the
pre-existing tuple using the table name or its alias.
This feature is often referred to as upsert.
This is implemented using a new infrastructure called "speculative
insertion". It is an optimistic variant of regular insertion that first
does a pre-check for existing tuples and then attempts an insert. If a
violating tuple was inserted concurrently, the speculatively inserted
tuple is deleted and a new attempt is made. If the pre-check finds a
matching tuple the alternative DO NOTHING or DO UPDATE action is taken.
If the insertion succeeds without detecting a conflict, the tuple is
deemed inserted.
To handle the possible ambiguity between the excluded alias and a table
named excluded, and for convenience with long relation names, INSERT
INTO now can alias its target table.
Bumps catversion as stored rules change.
Author: Peter Geoghegan, with significant contributions from Heikki
Linnakangas and Andres Freund. Testing infrastructure by Jeff Janes.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
Dean Rasheed, Stephen Frost and many others.
plpgsql's historical method for converting datatypes during assignments was
to apply the source type's output function and then the destination type's
input function. Aside from being miserably inefficient in most cases, this
method failed outright in many cases where a user might expect it to work;
an example is that "declare x int; ... x := 3.9;" would fail, not round the
value to 4.
Instead, let's convert by applying the appropriate assignment cast whenever
there is one. To avoid breaking compatibility unnecessarily, fall back to
the I/O conversion method if there is no assignment cast.
So far as I can tell, there is just one case where this method produces a
different result than the old code in a case where the old code would not
have thrown an error. That is assignment of a boolean value to a string
variable (type text, varchar, or bpchar); the old way gave boolean's output
representation, ie 't'/'f', while the new way follows the behavior of the
bool-to-text cast and so gives 'true' or 'false'. This will need to be
called out as an incompatibility in the 9.5 release notes.
Aside from handling many conversion cases more sanely, this method is
often significantly faster than the old way. In part that's because
of more effective caching of the conversion info.
The number of % parameter markers in RAISE statement should match the number
of parameters given. We used to check that at execution time, but we have
all the information needed at compile time, so let's check it at compile
time instead. It's generally better to find mistakes earlier.
Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by Fabien Coelho
- Capitalize titles consistently.
- Fix some grammar.
- Group "Obtaining Information About an Error" under "Trapping Errors",
but make "Obtaining the Call Stack Context Information" its own
section, since it's not about errors.
Infrastructure to allow
plpgsql.extra_warnings
plpgsql.extra_errors
Initial extra checks only for shadowed_variables
Marko Tiikkaja and Petr Jelinek
Reviewed by Simon Riggs and Pavel Stěhule
From the Department of Nitpicking, be consistent with other escaping
and use 'E' instead of 'e' to escape the string in the example docs
for GET DISAGNOSTICS stack = PG_CONTEXT.
Noticed by Department Chief Magnus Hagander.
This option provides more detailed error messages when STRICT is used
and the number of rows returned is not one.
Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by Ian Lawrence Barwick
This adds the ability to get the call stack as a string from within a
PL/PgSQL function, which can be handy for logging to a table, or to
include in a useful message to an end-user.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Rushabh Lathia and rather heavily whacked
around by Stephen Frost.
Specifically, permit attaching them to the error in RAISE and retrieving
them from a caught error in GET STACKED DIAGNOSTICS. RAISE enforces
nothing about the content of the fields; for its purposes, they are just
additional string fields. Consequently, clarify in the protocol and
libpq documentation that the usual relationships between error fields,
like a schema name appearing wherever a table name appears, are not
universal. This freedom has other applications; consider a FDW
propagating an error from an RDBMS having no schema support.
Back-patch to 9.3, where core support for the error fields was
introduced. This prevents the confusion of having a release where libpq
exposes the fields and PL/pgSQL does not.
Pavel Stehule, lexical revisions by Noah Misch.
In the initial implementation of plan caching, we saved the active
search_path when a plan was first cached, then reinstalled that path
anytime we needed to reparse or replan. The idea of that was to try to
reselect the same referenced objects, in somewhat the same way that views
continue to refer to the same objects in the face of schema or name
changes. Of course, that analogy doesn't bear close inspection, since
holding the search_path fixed doesn't cope with object drops or renames.
Moreover sticking with the old path seems to create more surprises than
it avoids. So instead of doing that, consider that the cached plan depends
on search_path, and force reparse/replan if the active search_path is
different than it was when we last saved the plan.
This gets us fairly close to having "transparency" of plan caching, in the
sense that the cached statement acts the same as if you'd just resubmitted
the original query text for another execution. There are still some corner
cases where this fails though: a new object added in the search path
schema(s) might capture a reference in the query text, but we'd not realize
that and force a reparse. We might try to fix that in the future, but for
the moment it looks too expensive and complicated.
For some reason lost in the mists of prehistory, RETURN was only coded to
allow a simple reference to a composite variable when the function's return
type is composite. Allow an expression instead, while preserving the
efficiency of the original code path in the case where the expression is
indeed just a composite variable's name. Likewise for RETURN NEXT.
As is true in various other places, the supplied expression must yield
exactly the number and data types of the required columns. There was some
discussion of relaxing that for pl/pgsql, but no consensus yet, so this
patch doesn't address that.
Asif Rehman, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
Commit 3855968f32 added syntax, pg_dump,
psql support, and documentation, but the triggers didn't actually fire.
With this commit, they now do. This is still a pretty basic facility
overall because event triggers do not get a whole lot of information
about what the user is trying to do unless you write them in C; and
there's still no option to fire them anywhere except at the very
beginning of the execution sequence, but it's better than nothing,
and a good building block for future work.
Along the way, add a regression test for ALTER LARGE OBJECT, since
testing of event triggers reveals that we haven't got one.
Dimitri Fontaine and Robert Haas
Rearrange text to improve clarity, and add an example of implicit reference
to a plpgsql variable in a bound cursor's query. Byproduct of some work
I'd done on the "named cursor parameters" patch before giving up on it.
This variable provides only marginal error-prevention capability (since
it can only check the prefix of a qualified GUC name), and the consensus
is that that isn't worth the amount of hassle that maintaining the setting
creates for DBAs. So, let's just remove it.
With this commit, the system will silently accept a value for any qualified
GUC name at all, whether it has anything to do with any known extension or
not. (Unqualified names still have to match known built-in settings,
though; and you will get a WARNING at extension load time if there's an
unrecognized setting with that extension's prefix.)
There's still some discussion ongoing about whether to tighten that up and
if so how; but if we do come up with a solution, it's not likely to look
anything like custom_variable_classes.
Rewrite plancache.c so that a "cached plan" (which is rather a misnomer
at this point) can support generation of custom, parameter-value-dependent
plans, and can make an intelligent choice between using custom plans and
the traditional generic-plan approach. The specific choice algorithm
implemented here can probably be improved in future, but this commit is
all about getting the mechanism in place, not the policy.
In addition, restructure the API to greatly reduce the amount of extraneous
data copying needed. The main compromise needed to make that possible was
to split the initial creation of a CachedPlanSource into two steps. It's
worth noting in particular that SPI_saveplan is now deprecated in favor of
SPI_keepplan, which accomplishes the same end result with zero data
copying, and no need to then spend even more cycles throwing away the
original SPIPlan. The risk of long-term memory leaks while manipulating
SPIPlans has also been greatly reduced. Most of this improvement is based
on use of the recently-added MemoryContextSetParent primitive.
This is more SQL-spec-compliant, more easily extensible, and better
performing than the old method of inventing special variables.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada and David Wheeler