Commit Graph

60 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Tom Lane ba2c6d6cec Avoid misbehavior when persisting a non-stable cursor.
PersistHoldablePortal has long assumed that it should store the
entire output of the query-to-be-persisted, which requires rewinding
and re-reading the output.  This is problematic if the query is not
stable: we might get different row contents, or even a different
number of rows, which'd confuse the cursor state mightily.

In the case where the cursor is NO SCROLL, this is very easy to
solve: just store the remaining query output, without any rewinding,
and tweak the portal's cursor state to match.  Aside from removing
the semantic problem, this could be significantly more efficient
than storing the whole output.

If the cursor is scrollable, there's not much we can do, but it
was already the case that scrolling a volatile query's result was
pretty unsafe.  We can just document more clearly that getting
correct results from that is not guaranteed.

There are already prohibitions in place on using SCROLL with
FOR UPDATE/SHARE, which is one way for a SELECT query to have
non-stable results.  We could imagine prohibiting SCROLL when
the query contains volatile functions, but that would be
expensive to enforce.  Moreover, it could break applications
that work just fine, if they have functions that are in fact
stable but the user neglected to mark them so.  So settle for
documenting the hazard.

While this problem has existed in some guise for a long time,
it got a lot worse in v11, which introduced the possibility
of persisting plpgsql cursors (perhaps implicit ones) even
when they violate the rules for what can be marked WITH HOLD.
Hence, I've chosen to back-patch to v11 but not further.

Per bug #17050 from Алексей Булгаков.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17050-f77aa827dc85247c@postgresql.org
2021-06-08 17:50:29 -04:00
Michael Paquier 609b0652af Fix typos and grammar in documentation and code comments
Comment fixes are applied on HEAD, and documentation improvements are
applied on back-branches where needed.

Author: Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210408164008.GJ6592@telsasoft.com
Backpatch-through: 9.6
2021-04-09 13:53:07 +09:00
Peter Eisentraut dd13ad9d39 Fix use of cursor sensitivity terminology
Documentation and comments in code and tests have been using the terms
sensitive/insensitive cursor incorrectly relative to the SQL standard.
(Cursor sensitivity is only relevant for changes made in the same
transaction as the cursor, not for concurrent changes in other
sessions.)  Moreover, some of the behavior of PostgreSQL is incorrect
according to the SQL standard, confusing the issue further.  (WHERE
CURRENT OF changes are not visible in insensitive cursors, but they
should be.)

This change corrects the terminology and removes the claim that
sensitive cursors are supported.  It also adds a test case that checks
the insensitive behavior in a "correct" way, using a change command
not using WHERE CURRENT OF.  Finally, it adds the ASENSITIVE cursor
option to select the default asensitive behavior, per SQL standard.

There are no changes to cursor behavior in this patch.

Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/96ee8b30-9889-9e1b-b053-90e10c050e85%40enterprisedb.com
2021-04-07 08:05:55 +02:00
Peter Eisentraut 9081bddbd7 Improve <xref> vs. <command> formatting in the documentation
SQL commands are generally marked up as <command>, except when a link
to a reference page is used using <xref>.  But the latter doesn't
create monospace markup, so this looks strange especially when a
paragraph contains a mix of links and non-links.

We considered putting <command> in the <refentrytitle> on the target
side, but that creates some formatting side effects elsewhere.
Generally, it seems safer to solve this on the link source side.

We can't put the <xref> inside the <command>; the DTD doesn't allow
this.  DocBook 5 would allow the <command> to have the linkend
attribute itself, but we are not there yet.

So to solve this for now, convert the <xref>s to <link> plus
<command>.  This gives the correct look and also gives some more
flexibility what we can put into the link text (e.g., subcommands or
other clauses).  In the future, these could then be converted to
DocBook 5 style.

I haven't converted absolutely all xrefs to SQL command reference
pages, only those where we care about the appearance of the link text
or where it was otherwise appropriate to make the appearance match a
bit better.  Also in some cases, the links where repetitive, so in
those cases the links where just removed and replaced by a plain
<command>.  In cases where we just want the link and don't
specifically care about the generated link text (typically phrased
"for further information see <xref ...>") the xref is kept.

Reported-by: Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker <ilmari@ilmari.org>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/87o8pco34z.fsf@wibble.ilmari.org
2020-10-03 16:40:02 +02:00
Tom Lane 60c90c16c1 Doc: fix "Unresolved ID reference" warnings, clean up man page cross-refs.
Use xreflabel attributes instead of endterm attributes to control the
appearance of links to subsections of SQL command reference pages.
This is simpler, it matches what we do elsewhere (e.g. for GUC variables),
and it doesn't draw "Unresolved ID reference" warnings from the PDF
toolchain.

Fix some places where the text was absolutely dependent on an <xref>
rendering exactly so, by using a <link> around the required text
instead.  At least one of those spots had already been turned into
bad grammar by subsequent changes, and the whole idea is just too
fragile for my taste.  <xref> does NOT have fixed output, don't write
as if it does.

Consistently include a page-level link in cross-man-page references,
because otherwise they are useless/nonsensical in man-page output.
Likewise, be consistent about mentioning "below" or "above" in same-page
references; we were doing that in about 90% of the cases, but now it's
100%.

Also get rid of another nonfunctional-in-PDF idea, of making
cross-references to functions by sticking ID tags on <row> constructs.
We can put the IDs on <indexterm>s instead --- which is probably not any
more sensible in abstract terms, but it works where the other doesn't.
(There is talk of attaching cross-reference IDs to most or all of
the docs' function descriptions, but for now I just fixed the two
that exist.)

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/14480.1589154358@sss.pgh.pa.us
2020-05-11 14:15:55 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 99164e6952 doc: adjust DECLARE docs to mention FOR UPDATE behavior
Reported-by: Peter Eisentraut

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/8dc63ba7-dc56-fc7c-fc16-4fae03e3bfe6@2ndquadrant.com

Author: Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane, me

Backpatch-through: 9.3
2018-05-28 13:16:02 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut 3c49c6facb Convert documentation to DocBook XML
Since some preparation work had already been done, the only source
changes left were changing empty-element tags like <xref linkend="foo">
to <xref linkend="foo"/>, and changing the DOCTYPE.

The source files are still named *.sgml, but they are actually XML files
now.  Renaming could be considered later.

In the build system, the intermediate step to convert from SGML to XML
is removed.  Everything is build straight from the source files again.
The OpenSP (or the old SP) package is no longer needed.

The documentation toolchain instructions are updated and are much
simpler now.

Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
2017-11-23 09:44:28 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut 1ff01b3902 Convert SGML IDs to lower case
IDs in SGML are case insensitive, and we have accumulated a mix of upper
and lower case IDs, including different variants of the same ID.  In
XML, these will be case sensitive, so we need to fix up those
differences.  Going to all lower case seems most straightforward, and
the current build process already makes all anchors and lower case
anyway during the SGML->XML conversion, so this doesn't create any
difference in the output right now.  A future XML-only build process
would, however, maintain any mixed case ID spellings in the output, so
that is another reason to clean this up beforehand.

Author: Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>
2017-10-20 19:26:10 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut c29c578908 Don't use SGML empty tags
For DocBook XML compatibility, don't use SGML empty tags (</>) anymore,
replace by the full tag name.  Add a warning option to catch future
occurrences.

Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
2017-10-17 15:10:33 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut bb4eefe7bf doc: Improve DocBook XML validity
DocBook XML is superficially compatible with DocBook SGML but has a
slightly stricter DTD that we have been violating in a few cases.
Although XSLT doesn't care whether the document is valid, the style
sheets don't necessarily process invalid documents correctly, so we need
to work toward fixing this.

This first commit moves the indexterms in refentry elements to an
allowed position.  It has no impact on the output.
2014-02-23 21:31:08 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut 6ef2448796 Fix a whitespace issue with the man pages
There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup.  The problem is
in a situation like

<para>
 <command>FOO</command> is ...

there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO".  In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.

So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like

<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>

So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace.  I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.
2011-08-07 10:55:32 +03:00
Magnus Hagander 9f2e211386 Remove cvs keywords from all files. 2010-09-20 22:08:53 +02:00
Peter Eisentraut 6dcce3985b Remove unnecessary xref endterm attributes and title ids
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.
2010-04-03 07:23:02 +00:00
Tom Lane 661b3e79c4 Add a warning about possible strange behavior of volatile functions
in cursors.  This has always been the case, but given the lack of user
complaints about it, I'm not going to bother back-patching this.
2009-06-10 19:21:37 +00:00
Tom Lane 843c6546eb Add cross-references from the DECLARE and FETCH reference pages to
the plpgsql documentation about cursors.  Per a suggestion from
Matthew Wakeling.
2009-04-10 17:56:21 +00:00
Tom Lane 18004101ac Modify UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF to use the FOR UPDATE infrastructure to
locate the target row, if the cursor was declared with FOR UPDATE or FOR
SHARE.  This approach is more flexible and reliable than digging through the
plan tree; for instance it can cope with join cursors.  But we still provide
the old code for use with non-FOR-UPDATE cursors.  Per gripe from Robert Haas.
2008-11-16 17:34:28 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut d129255077 Set SQL man pages to be section 7 by default, and only transform them to
another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).

This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
2008-11-14 10:22:48 +00:00
Tom Lane 31b15fe8dc Disallow LOCK TABLE outside a transaction block (or function), since this case
almost certainly represents user error.  Per a gripe from Sebastian Böhm
and subsequent discussion.
2008-11-04 00:57:19 +00:00
Tom Lane 048efc25e4 Disallow scrolling of FOR UPDATE/FOR SHARE cursors, so as to avoid problems
in corner cases such as re-fetching a just-deleted row.  We may be able to
relax this someday, but let's find out how many people really care before
we invest a lot of work in it.  Per report from Heikki and subsequent
discussion.

While in the neighborhood, make the combination of INSENSITIVE and FOR UPDATE
throw an error, since they are semantically incompatible.  (Up to now we've
accepted but just ignored the INSENSITIVE option of DECLARE CURSOR.)
2007-10-24 23:27:08 +00:00
Tom Lane 6808f1b1de Support UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF cursor_name, per SQL standard.
Along the way, allow FOR UPDATE in non-WITH-HOLD cursors; there may once
have been a reason to disallow that, but it seems to work now, and it's
really rather necessary if you want to select a row via a cursor and then
update it in a concurrent-safe fashion.

Original patch by Arul Shaji, rather heavily editorialized by Tom Lane.
2007-06-11 01:16:30 +00:00
Bruce Momjian e81c138e18 Update reference documentation on may/can/might:
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".
2007-01-31 23:26:05 +00:00
Tom Lane b5b1eb80b7 Documentation for VALUES lists. Joe Conway and Tom Lane 2006-09-18 19:54:01 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 32cebaecff Remove emacs info from footer of SGML files. 2006-09-16 00:30:20 +00:00
Neil Conway c5e0415a28 Minor SGML work: add some more hyperlinks, where appropriate. 2006-02-26 03:20:46 +00:00
Tom Lane 1ac1526ea0 Fix broken markup. 2006-02-12 20:31:58 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 92a26489ac > Actually, if you submit a patch that says either "SCROLL is the
default"
> or "NO SCROLL is the default", it will be rejected as incorrect.  The
> reason is that the default behavior is different from either of these,
> as is explained in the NOTES section.

Ok, so *that's* where the bit about the query plan being simple enough.
Based on that, ISTM that it should be premissable for us to decide that
a cursor requiring a sort isn't "simple enough" to support SCROLL.

In any case, here's a patch that makes the non-standard behavior easier
for people to find.

Jim C. Nasby
2006-02-12 19:02:15 +00:00
Neil Conway 33e06ebccb Add a new system view, pg_cursors, that displays the currently available
cursors. Patch from Joachim Wieland, review and ediorialization by Neil
Conway. The view lists cursors defined by DECLARE CURSOR, using SPI, or
via the Bind message of the frontend/backend protocol. This means the
view does not list the unnamed portal or the portal created to implement
EXECUTE. Because we do list SPI portals, there might be more rows in
this view than you might expect if you are using SPI implicitly (e.g.
via a procedural language).

Per recent discussion on -hackers, the query string included in the
view for cursors defined by DECLARE CURSOR is based on
debug_query_string. That means it is not accurate if multiple queries
separated by semicolons are submitted as one query string. However,
there doesn't seem a trivial fix for that: debug_query_string
is better than nothing. I also changed SPI_cursor_open() to include
the source text for the portal it creates: AFAICS there is no reason
not to do this.

Update the documentation and regression tests, bump the catversion.
2006-01-18 06:49:30 +00:00
Tom Lane 4e94ea9fc9 More minor updates and copy-editing. 2005-01-04 00:39:53 +00:00
Neil Conway ec7a6bd9a2 Replace "--" and "---" with "&mdash;" as appropriate, for better-looking
output.
2004-11-15 06:32:15 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 474875f443 The attached patch adds some index entries pointing to the cursor
reference pages.  Please apply.

Alvaro Herrera
2004-06-17 12:41:02 +00:00
PostgreSQL Daemon 969685ad44 $Header: -> $PostgreSQL Changes ... 2003-11-29 19:52:15 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 5d00f984d8 Make the SQL command synopses appear less random. 2003-09-22 00:16:58 +00:00
Tom Lane e90b841915 More cleanup of Diagnostics sections. 2003-09-12 00:12:47 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 2a5b6a7c9b This patch fixes a few missed GUC variables that were still upper case,
makes a few more small improvements to runtime.sgml, and makes some SGML
conventions more consistent.

Neil Conway
2003-09-11 21:42:20 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut c326d8f4f2 Add/edit index entries. 2003-08-31 17:32:24 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 693aad413b Change warnings for non-existing or pre-existing cursors to errors. 2003-08-24 21:02:43 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut d1b4327d02 Last round of reference page editing. 2003-05-04 02:23:16 +00:00
Tom Lane 4a5f38c4e6 Code review for holdable-cursors patch. Fix error recovery, memory
context sloppiness, some other things.  Includes Neil's mopup patch
of 22-Apr.
2003-04-29 03:21:30 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut d7c333eb9a Fix markup. 2003-04-06 22:41:52 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 54f7338fa1 This patch implements holdable cursors, following the proposal
(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
2003-03-27 16:51:29 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 93331d8318 Remove mention of transactions for insensitive cursors. 2003-03-21 17:11:46 +00:00
Tom Lane aa83bc04e0 Restructure parsetree representation of DECLARE CURSOR: now it's a
utility statement (DeclareCursorStmt) with a SELECT query dangling from
it, rather than a SELECT query with a few unusual fields in it.  Add
code to determine whether a planned query can safely be run backwards.
If DECLARE CURSOR specifies SCROLL, ensure that the plan can be run
backwards by adding a Materialize plan node if it can't.  Without SCROLL,
you get an error if you try to fetch backwards from a cursor that can't
handle it.  (There is still some discussion about what the exact
behavior should be, but this is necessary infrastructure in any case.)
Along the way, make EXPLAIN DECLARE CURSOR work.
2003-03-10 03:53:52 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 2c50f6344b Revise command completion tags as per hackers message on 20 March. 2002-05-18 15:44:48 +00:00
Thomas G. Lockhart c05f29e895 Augment the date/time examples in the User's Guide to reflect the newer
capabilities of specifying time zones as intervals per SQL9x.
Put refentrytitle contents on the same line as the tag.
 Otherwise, leading whitespace is propagated into the product, which
 (at least) messes up the ToC layout.
Remove (some) docinfo tags containing dates. Best to omit if the dates
 are not accurate; maybe use CVS dates instead or leave them out.
2002-04-21 19:02:39 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 3c0d21a28e Update reference pages for new INFO, NOTICE, WARNING elog() levels. 2002-03-06 06:48:05 +00:00
Thomas G. Lockhart 03a321d214 Use PostgreSQL consistantly throughout docs. Before, usage was split evenly
between Postgres and PostgreSQL.
2001-12-08 03:24:40 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 351a0c1736 Replace ASCII-quotes with proper markup. 2001-09-13 15:55:24 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 89a1ea4207 Put some kind of grammatical uniformity in the <refpurpose> lines. 2001-09-03 12:57:50 +00:00
Tom Lane bf0078d257 Update obsolete wording of error message. 2001-02-15 21:11:17 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut dccfd74935 Refine some things to create better looking man pages. 2000-12-25 23:15:27 +00:00