Errors detected using Topy (https://github.com/intgr/topy), all
changes verified by hand and some manual tweaks added.
Marti Raudsepp
Individual changes backpatched, where applicable, as far as 9.0.
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".
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.
representation of equivalence classes of variables. This is an extensive
rewrite, but it brings a number of benefits:
* planner no longer fails in the presence of "incomplete" operator families
that don't offer operators for every possible combination of datatypes.
* avoid generating and then discarding redundant equality clauses.
* remove bogus assumption that derived equalities always use operators
named "=".
* mergejoins can work with a variety of sort orders (e.g., descending) now,
instead of tying each mergejoinable operator to exactly one sort order.
* better recognition of redundant sort columns.
* can make use of equalities appearing underneath an outer join.
cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator families". While most
families are equivalent to a single class, related classes can be grouped
into one family to represent the fact that they are semantically compatible.
Cross-type operators are now naturally adjunct parts of a family, without
having to wedge them into a particular opclass as we had done originally.
This commit restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of the work
needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come later. Also,
there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands; the only way
to create a new family right now is to allow CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make
one by default. I owe some more documentation work, too. But that can all
be done in smaller pieces once this infrastructure is in place.
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.
containing a volatile function), rather than only on 'Var = Var' clauses
as before. This makes it practical to do flatten_join_alias_vars at the
start of planning, which in turn eliminates a bunch of klugery inside the
planner to deal with alias vars. As a free side effect, we now detect
implied equality of non-Var expressions; for example in
SELECT ... WHERE a.x = b.y and b.y = 42
we will deduce a.x = 42 and use that as a restriction qual on a. Also,
we can remove the restriction introduced 12/5/02 to prevent pullup of
subqueries whose targetlists contain sublinks.
Still TODO: make statistical estimation routines in selfuncs.c and costsize.c
smarter about expressions that are more complex than plain Vars. The need
for this is considerably greater now that we have to be able to estimate
the suitability of merge and hash join techniques on such expressions.
required if a datatype is to be accepted by GROUP BY, DISTINCT, or
ORDER BY. This is documentation for code changes made pursuant to
pgsql-hackers discussion around 29-Nov-02.
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
(LIKE and regexp matches). These are not yet referenced in pg_operator,
so by default the system will continue to use eqsel/neqsel.
Also, tweak convert_to_scalar() logic so that common prefixes of strings
are stripped off, allowing better accuracy when all strings in a table
share a common prefix.
selectivity functions and make the r-tree operators use them. The
estimation functions themselves are just stubs, unfortunately, but
perhaps someday someone will make them compute realistic estimates.
Change pg_am so that the optimizer can reliably tell the difference
between ordered and unordered indexes --- before it would think that
an r-tree index can be scanned in '<<' order, which is not right AFAIK.
Repair broken negator links for network_sup and related ops.
Initdb forced. This might be my last initdb force for 7.0 ... hope so
anyway ...
(ie, WHERE x > lowbound AND x < highbound). It's not very bright yet
but it does something useful. Also, rename intltsel/intgtsel to
scalarltsel/scalargtsel to reflect usage better. Extend convert_to_scalar
to do something a little bit useful with string data types. Still need
to make it do something with date/time datatypes, but I'll wait for
Thomas's datetime unification dust to settle first. Eventually the
routine ought not have any type-specific knowledge at all; it ought to
be calling a type-dependent routine found via a pg_type column; but
that's a task for another day.
Add an appendix with more details on date/time attributes and handling.
Update most references to Postgres version numbers to 6.5,
*except* for the porting list which will require a report
from a successful installation to be updated.
Kevin Grittner
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Magnus Hagander
Tom Lane
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Thomas G. Lockhart