parentheses in syntax descriptions. Consistently use the present tense
when describing the basic purpose of each "DROP" command. Add a few
more hyperlinks.
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".
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
locks that logically should not be released, because when a subtransaction
overwrites XMAX all knowledge of the previous lock state is lost. It seems
unlikely that we will be able to fix this before 8.3...
support both FOR UPDATE and FOR SHARE in one command, as well as both
NOWAIT and normal WAIT behavior. The more general code is actually
simpler and cleaner.
to eliminate unnecessary deadlocks. This commit adds SELECT ... FOR SHARE
paralleling SELECT ... FOR UPDATE. The implementation uses a new SLRU
data structure (managed much like pg_subtrans) to represent multiple-
transaction-ID sets. When more than one transaction is holding a shared
lock on a particular row, we create a MultiXactId representing that set
of transactions and store its ID in the row's XMAX. This scheme allows
an effectively unlimited number of row locks, just as we did before,
while not costing any extra overhead except when a shared lock actually
has to be shared. Still TODO: use the regular lock manager to control
the grant order when multiple backends are waiting for a row lock.
Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.
the long-term plan for this behavior for quite some time, but it is only
possible now that DELETE has a USING clause so that the user can join
other tables in a DELETE statement without relying on this behavior.
Formerly, if such a clause contained no aggregate functions we mistakenly
treated it as equivalent to WHERE. Per spec it must cause the query to
be treated as a grouped query of a single group, the same as appearance
of aggregate functions would do. Also, the HAVING filter must execute
after aggregate function computation even if it itself contains no
aggregate functions.
join is defined as:
from_item [ NATURAL ] join_type from_item
[ ON join_condition | USING ( join_column_list ) ]
However, if the join_type is an INNER or OUTER join, an ON, USING, or
NATURAL clause *must* be specified (it's not optional, as that segment
of the docs suggest).
I'm not exactly sure what the best way to fix this is, so I've attached
a patch adding a FIXME comment to the relevant section of the SGML. If
anyone has any ideas on the proper way to outline join syntax, please
speak up.
Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> || PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC
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
> > This patch improves the documentation of the UPDATE and ALTER TABLE
> > commands to elaborate on the effect of specifying an "ONLY" clause.
>
> Unfortunately this is still only half the truth ... see the
> SQL_INHERITANCE configuration variable.
Okay, I've attached an updated patch with more information on
SQL_INHERITANCE and inheritance behavior in prior releases.
Neil Conway
types for Table Functions, as previously proposed on HACKERS. Here is a
brief explanation:
1. Creates a new pg_type typtype: 'p' for pseudo type (currently either
'b' for base or 'c' for catalog, i.e. a class).
2. Creates new builtin type of typtype='p' named RECORD. This is the
first of potentially several pseudo types.
3. Modify FROM clause grammer to accept:
SELECT * FROM my_func() AS m(colname1 type1, colname2 type1, ...)
where m is the table alias, colname1, etc are the column names, and
type1, etc are the column types.
4. When typtype == 'p' and the function return type is RECORD, a list
of column defs is required, and when typtype != 'p', it is
disallowed.
5. A check was added to ensure that the tupdesc provide via the parser
and the actual return tupdesc match in number and type of
attributes.
When creating a function you can do:
CREATE FUNCTION foo(text) RETURNS setof RECORD ...
When using it you can do:
SELECT * from foo(sqlstmt) AS (f1 int, f2 text, f3 timestamp)
or
SELECT * from foo(sqlstmt) AS f(f1 int, f2 text, f3 timestamp)
or
SELECT * from foo(sqlstmt) f(f1 int, f2 text, f3 timestamp)
Included in the patches are adjustments to the regression test sql and
expected files, and documentation.
p.s.
This potentially solves (or at least improves) the issue of builtin
Table Functions. They can be bootstrapped as returning RECORD, and
we can wrap system views around them with properly specified column
defs. For example:
CREATE VIEW pg_settings AS
SELECT s.name, s.setting
FROM show_all_settings()AS s(name text, setting text);
Then we can also add the UPDATE RULE that I previously posted to
pg_settings, and have pg_settings act like a virtual table, allowing
settings to be queried and set.
Joe Conway
