The allowed syntax for OVERLAPS, viz "row OVERLAPS row", is sufficiently
constrained that we don't actually need a precedence declaration for
OVERLAPS; indeed removing this declaration does not change the generated
gram.c file at all. Let's remove it to avoid confusion about whether
OVERLAPS has precedence or not. If we ever generalize what we allow for
OVERLAPS, we might need to put back a precedence declaration for it,
but we might want some other level than what it has today --- and leaving
the declaration there would just risk confusion about whether that would
be an incompatible change.
Likewise, remove OVERLAPS from the documentation's precedence table.
Per discussion with Noah Misch. Back-patch to 9.5 where we hacked up some
nearby precedence decisions.
You're required to write either RANGE or ROWS to start a frame clause,
but the documentation incorrectly implied this is optional. Noted by
David Johnston.
While the SQL standard is pretty vague on the overall topic of operator
precedence (because it never presents a unified BNF for all expressions),
it does seem reasonable to conclude from the spec for <boolean value
expression> that OR has the lowest precedence, then AND, then NOT, then IS
tests, then the six standard comparison operators, then everything else
(since any non-boolean operator in a WHERE clause would need to be an
argument of one of these).
We were only sort of on board with that: most notably, while "<" ">" and
"=" had properly low precedence, "<=" ">=" and "<>" were treated as generic
operators and so had significantly higher precedence. And "IS" tests were
even higher precedence than those, which is very clearly wrong per spec.
Another problem was that "foo NOT SOMETHING bar" constructs, such as
"x NOT LIKE y", were treated inconsistently because of a bison
implementation artifact: they had the documented precedence with respect
to operators to their right, but behaved like NOT (i.e., very low priority)
with respect to operators to their left.
Fixing the precedence issues is just a small matter of rearranging the
precedence declarations in gram.y, except for the NOT problem, which
requires adding an additional lookahead case in base_yylex() so that we
can attach a different token precedence to NOT LIKE and allied two-word
operators.
The bulk of this patch is not the bug fix per se, but adding logic to
parse_expr.c to allow giving warnings if an expression has changed meaning
because of these precedence changes. These warnings are off by default
and are enabled by the new GUC operator_precedence_warning. It's believed
that very few applications will be affected by these changes, but it was
agreed that a warning mechanism is essential to help debug any that are.
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.
The possibility that constant subexpressions of a CASE might be evaluated
at planning time was touched on in 9.17.1 (CASE expressions), but it really
ought to be explained in 4.2.14 (Expression Evaluation Rules) which is the
primary discussion of such topics. Add text and an example there, and
revise the <note> under CASE to link there.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since it's acted like this for a
long time (though 9.2+ is probably worse because of its more aggressive
use of constant-folding via replanning of nominally-prepared statements).
Pre-9.4, also back-patch text added in commit 0ce627d4 about CASE versus
aggregate functions.
Tom Lane and David Johnston, per discussion of bug #12273.
These cases formerly failed with errors about "could not find array type
for data type". Now they yield arrays of the same element type and one
higher dimension.
The implementation involves creating functions with API similar to the
existing accumArrayResult() family. I (tgl) also extended the base family
by adding an initArrayResult() function, which allows callers to avoid
special-casing the zero-inputs case if they just want an empty array as
result. (Not all do, so the previous calling convention remains valid.)
This allowed simplifying some existing code in xml.c and plperl.c.
Ali Akbar, reviewed by Pavel Stehule, significantly modified by me
The SELECT reference page didn't really address the question of when
aggregate function evaluation occurs, nor did the "expression evaluation
rules" documentation mention that CASE can't be used to control whether
an aggregate gets evaluated or not. Improve that.
Per discussion of bug #11661. Original text by Marti Raudsepp and Michael
Paquier, rewritten significantly by me.
This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set
aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in
SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(),
percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the
spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that
can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data.
Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting
process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the
support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API
function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of
the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the
immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to
install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that
infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up.
In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic
aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER
additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by
allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT.
It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types
but not these.
Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing,
and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
These things didn't work because the planner omitted to do the necessary
preprocessing of a WindowFunc's argument list. Add the few dozen lines
of code needed to handle that.
Although this sounds like a feature addition, it's really a bug fix because
the default-argument case was likely to crash previously, due to lack of
checking of the number of supplied arguments in the built-in window
functions. It's not a security issue because there's no way for a
non-superuser to create a window function definition with defaults that
refers to a built-in C function, but nonetheless people might be annoyed
that it crashes rather than producing a useful error message. So
back-patch as far as the patch applies easily, which turns out to be 9.2.
I'll put a band-aid in earlier versions as a separate patch.
(Note that these features still don't work for aggregates, and fixing that
case will be harder since we represent aggregate arg lists as target lists
not bare expression lists. There's no crash risk though because CREATE
AGGREGATE doesn't accept defaults, and we reject named-argument notation
when parsing an aggregate call.)
For rather inscrutable reasons, SQL:2008 disallows copying-and-modifying a
window definition that has any explicit framing clause. The error message
we gave for this only made sense if the referencing window definition
itself contains an explicit framing clause, which it might well not.
Moreover, in the context of an OVER clause it's not exactly obvious that
"OVER (windowname)" implies copy-and-modify while "OVER windowname" does
not. This has led to multiple complaints, eg bug #5199 from Iliya
Krapchatov. Change to a hopefully more intelligible error message, and
in the case where we have just "OVER (windowname)", add a HINT suggesting
that omitting the parentheses will fix it. Also improve the related
documentation. Back-patch to all supported branches.
There's no inherent reason why an aggregate function can't be variadic
(even VARIADIC ANY) if its transition function can handle the case.
Indeed, this patch to add the feature touches none of the planner or
executor, and little of the parser; the main missing stuff was DDL and
pg_dump support.
It is true that variadic aggregates can create the same sort of ambiguity
about parameters versus ORDER BY keys that was complained of when we
(briefly) had both one- and two-argument forms of string_agg(). However,
the policy formed in response to that discussion only said that we'd not
create any built-in aggregates with varying numbers of arguments, not that
we shouldn't allow users to do it. So the logical extension of that is
we can allow users to make variadic aggregates as long as we're wary about
shipping any such in core.
In passing, this patch allows aggregate function arguments to be named, to
the extent of remembering the names in pg_proc and dumping them in pg_dump.
You can't yet call an aggregate using named-parameter notation. That seems
like a likely future extension, but it'll take some work, and it's not what
this patch is really about. Likewise, there's still some work needed to
make window functions handle VARIADIC fully, but I left that for another
day.
initdb forced because of new aggvariadic field in Aggref parse nodes.
This is SQL-standard with a few extensions, namely support for
subqueries and outer references in clause expressions.
catversion bump due to change in Aggref and WindowFunc.
David Fetter, reviewed by Dean Rasheed.
This is so that these sections will have stable HTML tags that one can
link to, rather than things like "AEN1902". Perhaps we should mount a
campaign to do this everywhere, but I've found myself pointing at
syntax.sgml subsections often enough to be sure it's useful here.
We'll now use "exists" for EXISTS(SELECT ...), "array" for ARRAY(SELECT
...), or the sub-select's own result column name for a simple expression
sub-select. Previously, you usually got "?column?" in such cases.
Marti Raudsepp, reviewed by Kyotaro Horiugchi
Per gripe from Grzegorz Szpetkowski.
Also, change the subsection heading from "Lexical Precedence" (which is
a contradiction in terms) to "Operator Precedence".
As noted by Thom Brown, this confuses the DocBook index processor; it
fails to merge entries that differ only in whitespace, and sorts them
unexpectedly as well. Seems like a toolchain bug, but I'm not going to
hold my breath waiting for a fix.
Note: easiest way to find these is to look for double spaces in HTML.index.
This adds collation support for columns and domains, a COLLATE clause
to override it per expression, and B-tree index support.
Peter Eisentraut
reviewed by Pavel Stehule, Itagaki Takahiro, Robert Haas, Noah Misch
PG 8.4 added a built-in feature for casting pretty much any data type to
string types (text, varchar, etc). We allowed this to work in any of the
historically-allowed syntaxes: CAST(x AS text), x::text, text(x), or
x.text. However, multiple complaints have shown that it's too easy to
invoke such casts unintentionally in the latter two styles, particularly
field selection. To cure the problem with the narrowest possible change
of behavior, disallow use of I/O conversion casts from composite types to
string types via functional/attribute syntax. The new functionality is
still available via cast syntax.
In passing, document the equivalence of functional and attribute syntax
in a more visible place.
functionality, while creating an ambiguity in usage with ORDER BY that at
least two people have already gotten seriously confused by. Also, add an
opr_sanity test to check that we don't in future violate the newly minted
policy of not having built-in aggregates with the same name and different
numbers of parameters. Per discussion of a complaint from Thom Brown.
"val AS name" to "name := val", as per recent discussion.
This patch catches everything in the original named-parameters patch,
but I'm not certain that no other dependencies snuck in later (grepping
the source tree for all uses of AS soon proved unworkable).
In passing I note that we've dropped the ball at least once on keeping
ecpg's lexer (as opposed to parser) in sync with the backend. It would
be a good idea to go through all of pgc.l and see if it's in sync now.
I didn't attempt that at the moment.
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.
This patch allows the frame to start from CURRENT ROW (in either RANGE or
ROWS mode), and it also adds support for ROWS n PRECEDING and ROWS n FOLLOWING
start and end points. (RANGE value PRECEDING/FOLLOWING isn't there yet ---
the grammar works, but that's all.)
Hitoshi Harada, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Noah Misch
Magnus Hagander
Alvaro Herrera