functionality, but I still need to make another pass looking at places
that incidentally use arrays (such as ACL manipulation) to make sure they
are null-safe. Contrib needs work too.
I have not changed the behaviors that are still under discussion about
array comparison and what to do with lower bounds.
the builtin functions (although some more entries are still needed),
and remove the duplicate index entries that have been causing
collateindex.pl warnings. Consistently use "int" and "bigint", rather
than a mix of "int", "integer", "int4", "bigint", and "int8". Make
parenthesis style in syntax examples more consistent. Various
copy-editing for newly-added documentation and SGML markup fixes.
and RelationNameGetTupleDesc() as deprecated; remove uses of the
latter in the contrib library. Along the way, clean up crosstab()
code and documentation a little.
of tuples when passing data up through multiple plan nodes. A slot can now
hold either a normal "physical" HeapTuple, or a "virtual" tuple consisting
of Datum/isnull arrays. Upper plan levels can usually just copy the Datum
arrays, avoiding heap_formtuple() and possible subsequent nocachegetattr()
calls to extract the data again. This work extends Atsushi Ogawa's earlier
patch, which provided the key idea of adding Datum arrays to TupleTableSlots.
(I believe however that something like this was foreseen way back in Berkeley
days --- see the old comment on ExecProject.) A test case involving many
levels of join of fairly wide tables (about 80 columns altogether) showed
about 3x overall speedup, though simple queries will probably not be
helped very much.
I have also duplicated some code in heaptuple.c in order to provide versions
of heap_formtuple and friends that use "bool" arrays to indicate null
attributes, instead of the old convention of "char" arrays containing either
'n' or ' '. This provides a better match to the convention used by
ExecEvalExpr. While I have not made a concerted effort to get rid of uses
of the old routines, I think they should be deprecated and eventually removed.
can tell whether it is being used as an aggregate or not. This allows
such a function to avoid re-pallocing a pass-by-reference transition
value; normally it would be unsafe for a function to scribble on an input,
but in the aggregate case it's safe to reuse the old transition value.
Make int8inc() do this. This gets a useful improvement in the speed of
COUNT(*), at least on narrow tables (it seems to be swamped by I/O when
the table rows are wide). Per a discussion in early December with
Neil Conway. I also fixed int_aggregate.c to check this, thereby
turning it into something approaching a supportable technique instead
of being a crude hack.
mode see a fresh snapshot for each command in the function, rather than
using the latest interactive command's snapshot. Also, suppress fresh
snapshots as well as CommandCounterIncrement inside STABLE and IMMUTABLE
functions, instead using the snapshot taken for the most closely nested
regular query. (This behavior is only sane for read-only functions, so
the patch also enforces that such functions contain only SELECT commands.)
As per my proposal of 6-Sep-2004; I note that I floated essentially the
same proposal on 19-Jun-2002, but that discussion tailed off without any
action. Since 8.0 seems like the right place to be taking possibly
nontrivial backwards compatibility hits, let's get it done now.
SGML markup, add a "deprecated features" section to the 8.0 release
notes, untabify release.sgml and runtime.sgml, and make some other
minor improvements.
a variant of the function for the 'numeric' datatype; it would be possible
to add additional variants for other datatypes, but I haven't done so yet.
This commit includes regression tests and minimal documentation; if we
want developers to actually use this function in applications, we'll
probably need to document what it does more fully.
rather than allowing them only in a few special cases as before. In
particular you can now pass a ROW() construct to a function that accepts
a rowtype parameter. Internal generation of RowExprs fixes a number of
corner cases that used to not work very well, such as referencing the
whole-row result of a JOIN or subquery. This represents a further step in
the work I started a month or so back to make rowtype values into
first-class citizens.
results with tuples as ordinary varlena Datums. This commit does not
in itself do much for us, except eliminate the horrid memory leak
associated with evaluation of whole-row variables. However, it lays the
groundwork for allowing composite types as table columns, and perhaps
some other useful features as well. Per my proposal of a few days ago.
language handler to the 'Internals' area, per my proposal of yesterday.
Clean up the trigger documentation a bit. Push SPI chapter to the end
of its part, and reorder the Internals chapters into what seems a more
sensible order (at the moment anyway).
specific hash functions used by hash indexes, rather than the old
not-datatype-aware ComputeHashFunc routine. This makes it safe to do
hash joining on several datatypes that previously couldn't use hashing.
The sets of datatypes that are hash indexable and hash joinable are now
exactly the same, whereas before each had some that weren't in the other.
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.
- 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
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