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
constraints the planner is unable to disprove, hence simple btree-compatible
conditions should be used. We've seen people try to get cute with stuff
like date_part(something) = something at least twice now. Even if we
wanted to try to teach predtest.c about the properties of date_part,
most of the useful variants aren't immutable so nothing could be proved.
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".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
of caveats in different places, but close together. One called caveats,
one not. That looks like it just led to somebody not reading some
appropriate caveats in the second group of caveats (on -admin).
Simon Riggs
Stark, additional fixes and editorialization by Neil Conway. Greg's patch
description:
Some more doc patches for partitioned tables. In particular replace
the caveat that INCLUDING CONSTRAINTS doesn't exist and replace it
with documentation of, well, INCLUDING CONSTRAINTS.
Also, there was an instance of "LIKE WITH DEFAULTS" which is
actually spelled "LIKE INCLUDING DEFAULTS".
can create or modify rules for the table. Do setRuleCheckAsUser() while
loading rules into the relcache, rather than when defining a rule. This
ensures that permission checks for tables referenced in a rule are done with
respect to the current owner of the rule's table, whereas formerly ALTER TABLE
OWNER would fail to update the permission checking for associated rules.
Removal of separate RULE privilege is needed to prevent various scenarios
in which a grantee of RULE privilege could effectively have any privilege
of the table owner. For backwards compatibility, GRANT/REVOKE RULE is still
accepted, but it doesn't do anything. Per discussion here:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-04/msg01138.php
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
compatibility for release 7.2 and earlier. I have not altered any
mentions of release 7.3 or later. The release notes were not modified,
so the changes are still documented, just not in the main docs.
... in fact, it will be applied now in any query whatsoever. I'm still
a bit concerned about the cycles that might be expended in failed proof
attempts, but given that CE is turned off by default, it's the user's
choice whether to expend those cycles or not. (Possibly we should
change the simple bool constraint_exclusion parameter to something
more fine-grained?)
necessary, and be careful to refer to the right version where it is
useful to do so. This partially reverts an ill-considered search and
replace from a few months ago.
>>>I think a more accurate description would be "permissions not
>>>inherited by children," and that isn't necessarily a bug.
>>
>>I agree it may not be a bug - but it's more than the permissions not
>>being inherited: the parent is affected.
>
>
> Not really, once you understand what's happening. Unless you use
> FROM ONLY, selecting from the parent selects from the parent *and*
> its children. The parent itself isn't affected, as queries with
> FROM ONLY should demonstrate. I understand what you're saying --
> that there's an apparent effect on the parent -- but there really
> isn't.
Sean Burlington
whenever we generate a new OID. This prevents occasional duplicate-OID
errors that can otherwise occur once the OID counter has wrapped around.
Duplicate relfilenode values are also checked for when creating new
physical files. Per my recent proposal.
NO ACTION check is deferrable. This seems to be a closer approximation
to what the SQL spec says than what we were doing before, and it prevents
some anomalous behaviors that are possible now that triggers can fire
during the execution of PL functions.
Stephan Szabo.
and history files as per recent discussion. While at it, remove
pg_terminate_backend, since we have decided we do not have time during
this release cycle to address the reliability concerns it creates.
Split the 'Miscellaneous Functions' documentation section into
'System Information Functions' and 'System Administration Functions',
which hopefully will draw the eyes of those looking for such things.
- 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
