of Describe on a prepared statement. This was in the original 3.0
protocol proposal, but I took it out for reasons that seemed good at
the time. Put it back per yesterday's pghackers discussion.
implementation limits, do not issue an ERROR; instead issue a NOTICE and use
the max supported value. Per pgsql-general discussion of 28-Apr, this is
needed to allow easy porting from pre-7.3 releases where the limits were
higher.
Unrelated change in same area: accept GLOBAL TEMP/TEMPORARY as a synonym
for TEMPORARY, as per pgsql-hackers discussion of 15-Apr. We previously
rejected it, but that was based on a misreading of the spec --- SQL92's
GLOBAL temp tables are really closer to what we have than their LOCAL ones.
Both plannable queries and utility commands are now always executed
within Portals, which have been revamped so that they can handle the
load (they used to be good only for single SELECT queries). Restructure
code to push command-completion-tag selection logic out of postgres.c,
so that it won't have to be duplicated between simple and extended queries.
initdb forced due to addition of a field to Query nodes.
for tableID/columnID in RowDescription. (The latter isn't really
implemented yet though --- the backend always sends zeroes, and libpq
just throws away the data.)
initial values and runtime changes in selected parameters. This gets
rid of the need for an initial 'select pg_client_encoding()' query in
libpq, bringing us back to one message transmitted in each direction
for a standard connection startup. To allow server version to be sent
using the same GUC mechanism that handles other parameters, invent the
concept of a never-settable GUC parameter: you can 'show server_version'
but it's not settable by any GUC input source. Create 'lc_collate' and
'lc_ctype' never-settable parameters so that people can find out these
settings without need for pg_controldata. (These side ideas were all
discussed some time ago in pgsql-hackers, but not yet implemented.)
rewritten and the protocol is changed, but most elog calls are still
elog calls. Also, we need to contemplate mechanisms for controlling
all this functionality --- eg, how much stuff should appear in the
postmaster log? And what API should libpq expose for it?
have length words. COPY OUT reimplemented per new protocol: it doesn't
need \. anymore, thank goodness. COPY BINARY to/from frontend works,
at least as far as the backend is concerned --- libpq's PQgetline API
is not up to snuff, and will have to be replaced with something that is
null-safe. libpq uses message length words for performance improvement
(no cycles wasted rescanning long messages), but not yet for error
recovery.
with variable-width fields. No more truncation of long user names.
Also, libpq can now send its environment-variable-driven SET commands
as part of the startup packet, saving round trips to server.
some message types. In particular add text/binary flag to StartCopyIn
and StartCopyOut, so that client library can know what is expected or
forthcoming.
chapters on extending types, operators, and aggregates into the extending
functions chapter. Move the information on how to call table functions
into the queries chapter. Remove some outdated information that is
already present in a better form in other parts of the documentation.
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Bruce Momjian