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".
o -Allow dump/load of CSV format
This adds new keywords to COPY and \copy:
CSV - enable CSV mode (comma separated variable)
QUOTE - specify quote character
ESCAPE - specify escape character
FORCE - force quoting of specified column
LITERAL - suppress null comparison for columns
Doc changes included. Regression updates coming from Andrew.
before it is de-backslashed, not after. This allows the null string \N
to be reliably distinguished from the data value \N (which must be
represented as \\N). Per bug report from Manfred Koizar ... but it's
amazing this hasn't been reported before ...
Also, be consistent about encoding conversion for null string: the form
specified in the command is in the server encoding, but what is sent
to/from client must be in client encoding. This never worked quite
right before either.
(materialization into a tuple store) discussed on pgsql-hackers earlier.
I've updated the documentation and the regression tests.
Notes on the implementation:
- I needed to change the tuple store API slightly -- it assumes that it
won't be used to hold data across transaction boundaries, so the temp
files that it uses for on-disk storage are automatically reclaimed at
end-of-transaction. I added a flag to tuplestore_begin_heap() to control
this behavior. Is changing the tuple store API in this fashion OK?
- in order to store executor results in a tuple store, I added a new
CommandDest. This works well for the most part, with one exception: the
current DestFunction API doesn't provide enough information to allow the
Executor to store results into an arbitrary tuple store (where the
particular tuple store to use is chosen by the call site of
ExecutorRun). To workaround this, I've temporarily hacked up a solution
that works, but is not ideal: since the receiveTuple DestFunction is
passed the portal name, we can use that to lookup the Portal data
structure for the cursor and then use that to get at the tuple store the
Portal is using. This unnecessarily ties the Portal code with the
tupleReceiver code, but it works...
The proper fix for this is probably to change the DestFunction API --
Tom suggested passing the full QueryDesc to the receiveTuple function.
In that case, callers of ExecutorRun could "subclass" QueryDesc to add
any additional fields that their particular CommandDest needed to get
access to. This approach would work, but I'd like to think about it for
a little bit longer before deciding which route to go. In the mean time,
the code works fine, so I don't think a fix is urgent.
- (semi-related) I added a NO SCROLL keyword to DECLARE CURSOR, and
adjusted the behavior of SCROLL in accordance with the discussion on
-hackers.
- (unrelated) Cleaned up some SGML markup in sql.sgml, copy.sgml
Neil Conway
code review by Tom Lane. Remaining issues: functions that take or
return tuple types are likely to break if one drops (or adds!)
a column in the table defining the type. Need to think about what
to do here.
Along the way: some code review for recent COPY changes; mark system
columns attnotnull = true where appropriate, per discussion a month ago.
The attached patch completes the following TODO item:
* Generate failure on short COPY lines rather than pad NULLs
I also restructed a lot of the existing COPY code, did some code
review on the column list patch sent in by Brent Verner a little
while ago, and added some regression tests. I also added an
explicit check (and resultant error) for extra data before
the end-of-line.
Neil Conway
COPY x (a,d,c,b) from stdin;
COPY x (a,c) to stdout;
as well as the corresponding changes to pg_dump to use the new
functionality. This functionality is not available when using
the BINARY option. If a column is not specified in the COPY FROM
statement, its default values will be used.
In addition to this functionality, I tweaked a couple of the
error messages emitted by the new COPY <options> checks.
Brent Verner
