There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup. The problem is
in a situation like
<para>
<command>FOO</command> is ...
there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO". In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.
So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like
<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>
So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace. I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.
This means that they can initially be added to a large existing table
without checking its initial contents, but new tuples must comply to
them; a separate pass invoked by ALTER TABLE / VALIDATE can verify
existing data and ensure it complies with the constraint, at which point
it is marked validated and becomes a normal part of the table ecosystem.
An non-validated CHECK constraint is ignored in the planner for
constraint_exclusion purposes; when validated, cached plans are
recomputed so that partitioning starts working right away.
This patch also enables domains to have unvalidated CHECK constraints
attached to them as well by way of ALTER DOMAIN / ADD CONSTRAINT / NOT
VALID, which can later be validated with ALTER DOMAIN / VALIDATE
CONSTRAINT.
Thanks to Thom Brown, Dean Rasheed and Jaime Casanova for the various
reviews, and Robert Hass for documentation wording improvement
suggestions.
This patch was sponsored by Enova Financial.
The initial commit of the ALTER TABLE ADD FOREIGN KEY NOT VALID feature
failed to support labeling such constraints as deferrable. The best fix
for this seems to be to fold NOT VALID into ConstraintAttributeSpec.
That's a bit more general than the documented syntax, but it allows
better-targeted syntax error messages.
In addition, do some mostly-but-not-entirely-cosmetic code review for
the whole NOT VALID patch.
This syntax allows a standalone table to be made into a typed table,
or a typed table to be made standalone. This is possibly a mildly
useful feature in its own right, but the real motivation for this
change is that we need it to make pg_upgrade work with typed tables.
This doesn't actually fix that problem, but it's necessary
infrastructure.
Noah Misch
The initial collations patch treated a COLLATE spec as part of a TypeName,
following what can only be described as brain fade on the part of the SQL
committee. It's a lot more reasonable to treat COLLATE as a syntactically
separate object, so that it can be added in only the productions where it
actually belongs, rather than needing to reject it in a boatload of places
where it doesn't belong (something the original patch mostly failed to do).
In addition this change lets us meet the spec's requirement to allow
COLLATE anywhere in the clauses of a ColumnDef, and it avoids unfriendly
behavior for constructs such as "foo::type COLLATE collation".
To do this, pull collation information out of TypeName and put it in
ColumnDef instead, thus reverting most of the collation-related changes in
parse_type.c's API. I made one additional structural change, which was to
use a ColumnDef as an intermediate node in AT_AlterColumnType AlterTableCmd
nodes. This provides enough room to get rid of the "transform" wart in
AlterTableCmd too, since the ColumnDef can carry the USING expression
easily enough.
Also fix some other minor bugs that have crept in in the same areas,
like failure to copy recently-added fields of ColumnDef in copyfuncs.c.
While at it, document the formerly secret ability to specify a collation
in ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN TYPE, ALTER TYPE ADD ATTRIBUTE, and
ALTER TYPE ALTER ATTRIBUTE TYPE; and correct some misstatements about
what the default collation selection will be when COLLATE is omitted.
BTW, the three-parameter form of format_type() should go away too,
since it just contributes to the confusion in this area; but I'll do
that in a separate patch.
When the old type is binary coercible to the new type and the using
clause does not change the column contents, we can avoid a full table
rewrite, though any indexes on the affected columns will still need
to be rebuilt. This applies, for example, when changing a varchar
column to be of type text.
The prior coding assumed that the set of operations that force a
rewrite is identical to the set of operations that must be propagated
to tables making use of the affected table's rowtype. This is
no longer true: even though the tuples in those tables wouldn't
need to be modified, the data type change invalidate indexes built
using those composite type columns. Indexes on the table we're
actually modifying can be invalidated too, of course, but the
existing machinery is sufficient to handle that case.
Along the way, add some debugging messages that make it possible
to understand what operations ALTER TABLE is actually performing
in these cases.
Noah Misch and Robert Haas
FK constraints that are marked NOT VALID may later be VALIDATED, which uses an
ShareUpdateExclusiveLock on constraint table and RowShareLock on referenced
table. Significantly reduces lock strength and duration when adding FKs.
New state visible from psql.
Simon Riggs, with reviews from Marko Tiikkaja and Robert Haas
Remove the claim that ALTER TABLE .. SET DATA TYPE is the fastest way of
rewriting a table, since it no longer is.
Noah Misch and Robert Haas, based on a suggestion from Tom Lane.
This feature allows a unique or pkey constraint to be created using an
already-existing unique index. While the constraint isn't very
functionally different from the bare index, it's nice to be able to do that
for documentation purposes. The main advantage over just issuing a plain
ALTER TABLE ADD UNIQUE/PRIMARY KEY is that the index can be created with
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY, so that there is not a long interval where the
table is locked against updates.
On the way, refactor some of the code in DefineIndex() and index_create()
so that we don't have to pass through those functions in order to create
the index constraint's catalog entries. Also, in parse_utilcmd.c, pass
around the ParseState pointer in struct CreateStmtContext to save on
notation, and add error location pointers to some error reports that didn't
have one before.
Gurjeet Singh, reviewed by Steve Singer and Tom Lane
This is how it was documented originally, but several years ago somebody
decided that DEFAULT isn't a type of constraint. Well, the grammar thinks
it is. The documentation was wrong in two ways: it alleged that DEFAULT
had to appear before any other kind of constraint, and it alleged that you
can't prefix a DEFAULT clause with a "CONSTRAINT name" clause, when in fact
you can. (The latter behavior probably isn't SQL-standard, but our grammar
has always allowed it.)
This patch responds to Fujii Masao's observation that the ALTER TABLE
documentation mistakenly implied that you couldn't include DEFAULT in
ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN; though this isn't the way he proposed fixing it.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
Attributes can now have options, just as relations and tablespaces do, and
the reloptions code is used to parse, validate, and store them. For
simplicity and because these options are not performance critical, we store
them in a separate cache rather than the main relcache.
Thanks to Alex Hunsaker for the review.
Instead of requiring translators to translate the entire SQL command
synopses, change create_help.pl to only require them to translate the
placeholders, and paste those into the synopsis using a printf mechanism.
Make some small updates to the markup to make it easier to parse.
Note: This causes msgmerge of gettext 0.17 to segfault. You will need
the patch from https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27474 to make it work.
msgmerge usually only runs on babel.postgresql.org, however.
get rid of the OID column. This eliminates the problem discovered by Heikki
back in November that 8.4's suppression of "unnecessary" junk filtering in
INSERT/SELECT could lead to an Assert failure, or storing of oids into a table
that shouldn't have them if Asserts are off. While that particular problem
could have been solved in other ways, it seems likely to be just a forerunner
of things to come if we continue to allow tables to contain rows that disagree
with the pg_class.relhasoids setting. It's better to make this operation slow
than to sacrifice performance or risk bugs in more common code paths.
Also, add ALTER TABLE SET WITH OIDS to rewrite the table to add oids.
This was a bit more controversial, but in view of the very small amount of
extra code needed given the current ALTER TABLE infrastructure, it seems best
to eliminate the asymmetry in features.
per-table overrides of parameters.
This removes a whole class of problems related to misusing the catalog,
and perhaps more importantly, gives us pg_dump support for the parameters.
Based on a patch by Euler Taveira de Oliveira, heavily reworked by me.
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
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Simon Riggs
Itagaki Takahiro
Magnus Hagander
Andrew Dunstan
Neil Conway
Jan Wieck