SQL has standardized on => as the use of to specify named parameters,
and we've wanted for many years to support the same syntax ourselves,
but this has been complicated by the possible use of => as an operator
name. In PostgreSQL 9.0, we began emitting a warning when an operator
named => was defined, and in PostgreSQL 9.2, we stopped shipping a
=>(text, text) operator as part of hstore. By the time the next major
version of PostgreSQL is released, => will have been deprecated for a
full five years, so hopefully there won't be too many people still
relying on it. We continue to support := for compatibility with
previous PostgreSQL releases.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Petr Jelinek, with a few documentation
tweaks by me.
to note:
1) arttype is numeric. I thought this was the best way of allowing
arbitarily large factorials, even though factorial(2^63) is a large
number. Happy to change to integers if this is overkill.
2) since we're accepting numeric arguments, the patch tests for floats.
If a numeric is passed with non-zero decimal portion, an error is raised
since (from memory) they are undefined.
Gavin Sherry
large objects. Dump all these in pg_dump; also add code to pg_dump
user-defined conversions. Make psql's large object code rely on
the backend for inserting/deleting LOB comments, instead of trying to
hack pg_description directly. Documentation and regression tests added.
Christopher Kings-Lynne, code reviewed by Tom
OK, here are a passel of patches for the geometric data types.
These add a "circle" data type, new operators and functions
for the existing data types, and change the default formats
for some of the existing types to make them consistant with
each other. Current formatting conventions (e.g. compatible
with v6.0 to allow dump/reload) are supported, but the new
conventions should be an improvement and we can eventually
drop the old conventions entirely.
For example, there are two kinds of paths (connected line segments),
open and closed, and the old format was
'(1,2,1,2,3,4)' for a closed path with two points (1,2) and (3,4)
'(0,2,1,2,3,4)' for an open path with two points (1,2) and (3,4)
Pretty arcane, huh? The new format for paths is
'((1,2),(3,4))' for a closed path with two points (1,2) and (3,4)
'[(1,2),(3,4)]' for an open path with two points (1,2) and (3,4)
For polygons, the old convention is
'(0,4,2,0,4,3)' for a triangle with points at (0,0),(4,4), and (2,3)
and the new convention is
'((0,0),(4,4),(2,3))' for a triangle with points at (0,0),(4,4), and (2,3)
Other data types which are also represented as lists of points
(e.g. boxes, line segments, and polygons) have similar representations
(they surround each point with parens).
For v6.1, any format which can be interpreted as the old style format
is decoded as such; we can remove that backwards compatibility but ugly
convention for v7.0. This will allow dump/reloads from v6.0.
These include some updates to the regression test files to change the test
for creating a data type from "circle" to "widget" to keep the test from
trashing the new builtin circle type.
Robert Haas
Peter Eisentraut
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Thomas G. Lockhart
Marc G. Fournier