Commit Graph

182 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Alvaro Herrera 61d81bd28d Allow CHECK constraints to be declared ONLY
This makes them enforceable only on the parent table, not on children
tables.  This is useful in various situations, per discussion involving
people bitten by the restrictive behavior introduced in 8.4.

Message-Id:
8762mp93iw.fsf@comcast.net
CAFaPBrSMMpubkGf4zcRL_YL-AERUbYF_-ZNNYfb3CVwwEqc9TQ@mail.gmail.com

Authors: Nikhil Sontakke, Alex Hunsaker
Reviewed by Robert Haas and myself
2011-12-19 17:30:23 -03:00
Bruce Momjian c79003ea4f Remove unnecessary MATCH FULL specification in example.
Reported by Grzegorz Szpetkowski.
2011-09-10 09:24:46 -04:00
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
Alvaro Herrera 897795240c Enable CHECK constraints to be declared NOT VALID
This means that they can initially be added to a large existing table
without checking its initial contents, but new tuples must comply to
them; a separate pass invoked by ALTER TABLE / VALIDATE can verify
existing data and ensure it complies with the constraint, at which point
it is marked validated and becomes a normal part of the table ecosystem.

An non-validated CHECK constraint is ignored in the planner for
constraint_exclusion purposes; when validated, cached plans are
recomputed so that partitioning starts working right away.

This patch also enables domains to have unvalidated CHECK constraints
attached to them as well by way of ALTER DOMAIN / ADD CONSTRAINT / NOT
VALID, which can later be validated with ALTER DOMAIN / VALIDATE
CONSTRAINT.

Thanks to Thom Brown, Dean Rasheed and Jaime Casanova for the various
reviews, and Robert Hass for documentation wording improvement
suggestions.

This patch was sponsored by Enova Financial.
2011-06-30 11:24:31 -04:00
Tom Lane e1ccaff6ee Rework parsing of ConstraintAttributeSpec to improve NOT VALID handling.
The initial commit of the ALTER TABLE ADD FOREIGN KEY NOT VALID feature
failed to support labeling such constraints as deferrable.  The best fix
for this seems to be to fold NOT VALID into ConstraintAttributeSpec.
That's a bit more general than the documented syntax, but it allows
better-targeted syntax error messages.

In addition, do some mostly-but-not-entirely-cosmetic code review for
the whole NOT VALID patch.
2011-06-15 19:06:21 -04:00
Robert Haas 68739ba856 Allow ALTER TABLE name {OF type | NOT OF}.
This syntax allows a standalone table to be made into a typed table,
or a typed table to be made standalone.  This is possibly a mildly
useful feature in its own right, but the real motivation for this
change is that we need it to make pg_upgrade work with typed tables.
This doesn't actually fix that problem, but it's necessary
infrastructure.

Noah Misch
2011-04-20 21:38:47 -04:00
Tom Lane a051ef699c Remove collation information from TypeName, where it does not belong.
The initial collations patch treated a COLLATE spec as part of a TypeName,
following what can only be described as brain fade on the part of the SQL
committee.  It's a lot more reasonable to treat COLLATE as a syntactically
separate object, so that it can be added in only the productions where it
actually belongs, rather than needing to reject it in a boatload of places
where it doesn't belong (something the original patch mostly failed to do).
In addition this change lets us meet the spec's requirement to allow
COLLATE anywhere in the clauses of a ColumnDef, and it avoids unfriendly
behavior for constructs such as "foo::type COLLATE collation".

To do this, pull collation information out of TypeName and put it in
ColumnDef instead, thus reverting most of the collation-related changes in
parse_type.c's API.  I made one additional structural change, which was to
use a ColumnDef as an intermediate node in AT_AlterColumnType AlterTableCmd
nodes.  This provides enough room to get rid of the "transform" wart in
AlterTableCmd too, since the ColumnDef can carry the USING expression
easily enough.

Also fix some other minor bugs that have crept in in the same areas,
like failure to copy recently-added fields of ColumnDef in copyfuncs.c.

While at it, document the formerly secret ability to specify a collation
in ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN TYPE, ALTER TYPE ADD ATTRIBUTE, and
ALTER TYPE ALTER ATTRIBUTE TYPE; and correct some misstatements about
what the default collation selection will be when COLLATE is omitted.

BTW, the three-parameter form of format_type() should go away too,
since it just contributes to the confusion in this area; but I'll do
that in a separate patch.
2011-03-09 22:39:20 -05:00
Robert Haas 0d90dc16f8 Avoid a few more SET DATA TYPE table rewrites.
When the new type is an unconstrained domain over the old type, we don't
need to rewrite the table.

Noah Misch and Robert Haas
2011-02-14 23:40:05 -05:00
Robert Haas d31e2a495b Teach ALTER TABLE .. SET DATA TYPE to avoid some table rewrites.
When the old type is binary coercible to the new type and the using
clause does not change the column contents, we can avoid a full table
rewrite, though any indexes on the affected columns will still need
to be rebuilt.  This applies, for example, when changing a varchar
column to be of type text.

The prior coding assumed that the set of operations that force a
rewrite is identical to the set of operations that must be propagated
to tables making use of the affected table's rowtype.  This is
no longer true: even though the tuples in those tables wouldn't
need to be modified, the data type change invalidate indexes built
using those composite type columns.  Indexes on the table we're
actually modifying can be invalidated too, of course, but the
existing machinery is sufficient to handle that case.

Along the way, add some debugging messages that make it possible
to understand what operations ALTER TABLE is actually performing
in these cases.

Noah Misch and Robert Haas
2011-02-12 08:27:55 -05:00
Simon Riggs 722bf7017b Extend ALTER TABLE to allow Foreign Keys to be added without initial validation.
FK constraints that are marked NOT VALID may later be VALIDATED, which uses an
ShareUpdateExclusiveLock on constraint table and RowShareLock on referenced
table. Significantly reduces lock strength and duration when adding FKs.
New state visible from psql.

Simon Riggs, with reviews from Marko Tiikkaja and Robert Haas
2011-02-08 12:23:20 +00:00
Robert Haas edad08ba54 Update ALTER TABLE docs to mention using VACUUM FULL for rewrites.
Remove the claim that ALTER TABLE .. SET DATA TYPE is the fastest way of
rewriting a table, since it no longer is.

Noah Misch and Robert Haas, based on a suggestion from Tom Lane.
2011-02-04 13:08:56 -05:00
Itagaki Takahiro 69039ea8b5 Make 'on' uppercase in a sql example. 2011-01-26 22:35:01 +09:00
Robert Haas 2b2b2ae2aa Correct ALTER TYPE -> SET DATA TYPE in ALTER TABLE documentation.
The latter is the correct name of the operation to change the data type
of a column.

Noah Misch
2011-01-25 18:52:49 -05:00
Tom Lane 88452d5ba6 Implement ALTER TABLE ADD UNIQUE/PRIMARY KEY USING INDEX.
This feature allows a unique or pkey constraint to be created using an
already-existing unique index.  While the constraint isn't very
functionally different from the bare index, it's nice to be able to do that
for documentation purposes.  The main advantage over just issuing a plain
ALTER TABLE ADD UNIQUE/PRIMARY KEY is that the index can be created with
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY, so that there is not a long interval where the
table is locked against updates.

On the way, refactor some of the code in DefineIndex() and index_create()
so that we don't have to pass through those functions in order to create
the index constraint's catalog entries.  Also, in parse_utilcmd.c, pass
around the ParseState pointer in struct CreateStmtContext to save on
notation, and add error location pointers to some error reports that didn't
have one before.

Gurjeet Singh, reviewed by Steve Singer and Tom Lane
2011-01-25 15:43:05 -05:00
Tom Lane 31d2efaef5 Reclassify DEFAULT as a column_constraint item in the CREATE TABLE syntax.
This is how it was documented originally, but several years ago somebody
decided that DEFAULT isn't a type of constraint.  Well, the grammar thinks
it is.  The documentation was wrong in two ways: it alleged that DEFAULT
had to appear before any other kind of constraint, and it alleged that you
can't prefix a DEFAULT clause with a "CONSTRAINT name" clause, when in fact
you can.  (The latter behavior probably isn't SQL-standard, but our grammar
has always allowed it.)

This patch responds to Fujii Masao's observation that the ALTER TABLE
documentation mistakenly implied that you couldn't include DEFAULT in
ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN; though this isn't the way he proposed fixing it.
2010-12-28 21:38:05 -05:00
Magnus Hagander 9f2e211386 Remove cvs keywords from all files. 2010-09-20 22:08:53 +02:00
Tom Lane f7270a65b3 Stamp 9.0 release notes with expected release date; also some last-minute
copy-editing.
2010-09-16 18:15:21 +00:00
Bruce Momjian f5dc03dc69 Mention that when alter rewrites a table, indexes are also rebuilt. 2010-06-24 14:57:21 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera a5ec2986b3 Update ALTER TABLE docs to account for exclusion and deferrable uniqueness
constraints

Dean Rasheed
2010-06-09 17:48:10 +00:00
Tom Lane a4bbfb1aac Use "TOAST table" in place of the vague, not-used-elsewhere phrase
"supplementary storage table".
2010-05-13 18:54:18 +00:00
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
Robert Haas a3d8fbf3ae Fix mismatched tags introduced by attribute options patch.
Thanks to Devrim Gunduz for the report.
2010-01-22 17:30:24 +00:00
Robert Haas 76a47c0e74 Replace ALTER TABLE ... SET STATISTICS DISTINCT with a more general mechanism.
Attributes can now have options, just as relations and tablespaces do, and
the reloptions code is used to parse, validate, and store them.  For
simplicity and because these options are not performance critical, we store
them in a separate cache rather than the main relcache.

Thanks to Alex Hunsaker for the review.
2010-01-22 16:40:19 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 20f7f019f9 Easier to translate psql help
Instead of requiring translators to translate the entire SQL command
synopses, change create_help.pl to only require them to translate the
placeholders, and paste those into the synopsis using a printf mechanism.
Make some small updates to the markup to make it easier to parse.

Note: This causes msgmerge of gettext 0.17 to segfault.  You will need
the patch from https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27474 to make it work.
msgmerge usually only runs on babel.postgresql.org, however.
2009-09-18 05:00:42 +00:00
Tom Lane 9072592946 Add ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET STATISTICS DISTINCT
Robert Haas
2009-08-02 22:14:53 +00:00
Andrew Dunstan e73131a16a DROP IF EXISTS for columns and constraints. Andres Freund. 2009-07-20 02:42:28 +00:00
Tom Lane 71907f7de5 Fix unintelligible description created by removing only part of
a parenthetical remark.
2009-05-03 20:45:43 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 74aa1a45f7 Remove mention of pre-7.1 inheritance behavior from /ref pages; keep
mentions in main documentation.
2009-04-15 22:42:50 +00:00
Tom Lane 6d1e361852 Change ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS to rewrite the whole table to physically
get rid of the OID column.  This eliminates the problem discovered by Heikki
back in November that 8.4's suppression of "unnecessary" junk filtering in
INSERT/SELECT could lead to an Assert failure, or storing of oids into a table
that shouldn't have them if Asserts are off.  While that particular problem
could have been solved in other ways, it seems likely to be just a forerunner
of things to come if we continue to allow tables to contain rows that disagree
with the pg_class.relhasoids setting.  It's better to make this operation slow
than to sacrifice performance or risk bugs in more common code paths.

Also, add ALTER TABLE SET WITH OIDS to rewrite the table to add oids.
This was a bit more controversial, but in view of the very small amount of
extra code needed given the current ALTER TABLE infrastructure, it seems best
to eliminate the asymmetry in features.
2009-02-11 21:11:16 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 834a6da4f7 Update autovacuum to use reloptions instead of a system catalog, for
per-table overrides of parameters.

This removes a whole class of problems related to misusing the catalog,
and perhaps more importantly, gives us pg_dump support for the parameters.

Based on a patch by Euler Taveira de Oliveira, heavily reworked by me.
2009-02-09 20:57:59 +00:00
Tom Lane 65e3ea7641 Increase the default value of default_statistics_target from 10 to 100,
and its maximum value from 1000 to 10000.  ALTER TABLE SET STATISTICS
similarly now allows a value up to 10000.  Per discussion.
2008-12-13 19:13:44 +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
Peter Eisentraut 1471e3843d Allow SQL:2008 syntax ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET DATA TYPE
alongside our traditional syntax.
2008-10-21 08:38:16 +00:00
Tom Lane cd902b331d Change the rules for inherited CHECK constraints to be essentially the same
as those for inherited columns; that is, it's no longer allowed for a child
table to not have a check constraint matching one that exists on a parent.
This satisfies the principle of least surprise (rows selected from the parent
will always appear to meet its check constraints) and eliminates some
longstanding bogosity in pg_dump, which formerly had to guess about whether
check constraints were really inherited or not.

The implementation involves adding conislocal and coninhcount columns to
pg_constraint (paralleling attislocal and attinhcount in pg_attribute)
and refactoring various ALTER TABLE actions to be more like those for
columns.

Alex Hunsaker, Nikhil Sontakke, Tom Lane
2008-05-09 23:32:05 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 9293425819 spell checker run 2007-11-28 15:42:31 +00:00
Neil Conway db5ff64df1 Tweaks for SGML markup. 2007-05-17 23:36:04 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 183c12e0d7 Remove tabs from SGML file. 2007-03-22 15:45:56 +00:00
Jan Wieck 0fe16500d3 Changes pg_trigger and extend pg_rewrite in order to allow triggers and
rules to be defined with different, per session controllable, behaviors
for replication purposes.

This will allow replication systems like Slony-I and, as has been stated
on pgsql-hackers, other products to control the firing mechanism of
triggers and rewrite rules without modifying the system catalog directly.

The firing mechanisms are controlled by a new superuser-only GUC
variable, session_replication_role, together with a change to
pg_trigger.tgenabled and a new column pg_rewrite.ev_enabled. Both
columns are a single char data type now (tgenabled was a bool before).
The possible values in these attributes are:

     'O' - Trigger/Rule fires when session_replication_role is "origin"
           (default) or "local". This is the default behavior.

     'D' - Trigger/Rule is disabled and fires never

     'A' - Trigger/Rule fires always regardless of the setting of
           session_replication_role

     'R' - Trigger/Rule fires when session_replication_role is "replica"

The GUC variable can only be changed as long as the system does not have
any cached query plans. This will prevent changing the session role and
accidentally executing stored procedures or functions that have plans
cached that expand to the wrong query set due to differences in the rule
firing semantics.

The SQL syntax for changing a triggers/rules firing semantics is

     ALTER TABLE <tabname> <when> TRIGGER|RULE <name>;

     <when> ::= ENABLE | ENABLE ALWAYS | ENABLE REPLICA | DISABLE

psql's \d command as well as pg_dump are extended in a backward
compatible fashion.

Jan
2007-03-19 23:38:32 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 09a9f10e7f Consistenly use colons before '<programlisting>' blocks, where
appropriate.
2007-02-01 00:28:19 +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
Peter Eisentraut 0f763503ff Spellchecking and such 2006-10-23 18:10:32 +00:00
Tom Lane f58eac82ee Code and docs review for ALTER TABLE INHERIT/NO INHERIT patch. 2006-10-13 21:43:19 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 32cebaecff Remove emacs info from footer of SGML files. 2006-09-16 00:30:20 +00:00
Tom Lane 2b2a50722c Fix all known problems with pg_dump's handling of serial sequences
by abandoning the idea that it should say SERIAL in the dump.  Instead,
dump serial sequences and column defaults just like regular ones.
Add a new backend command ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED BY to let pg_dump recreate
the sequence-to-column dependency that was formerly created "behind the
scenes" by SERIAL.  This restores SERIAL to being truly "just a macro"
consisting of component operations that can be stated explicitly in SQL.
Furthermore, the new command allows sequence ownership to be reassigned,
so that old mistakes can be cleaned up.

Also, downgrade the OWNED-BY dependency from INTERNAL to AUTO, since there
is no longer any very compelling argument why the sequence couldn't be
dropped while keeping the column.  (This forces initdb, to be sure the
right kinds of dependencies are in there.)

Along the way, add checks to prevent ALTER OWNER or SET SCHEMA on an
owned sequence; you can now only do this indirectly by changing the
owning table's owner or schema.  This is an oversight in previous
releases, but probably not worth back-patching.
2006-08-21 00:57:26 +00:00
Tom Lane 7946f77220 Cause ALTER TABLE to perform ALTER COLUMN DROP DEFAULT operations during
the DROP pass rather than the ADD_CONSTR pass.  On examining the code I
think this was just an oversight rather than intentional, and it seems
to satisfy the principle of least surprise better than the alternative
solution that was discussed.  Add an example to the ref page showing how
to do ALTER TYPE and update the default in one command.  Per gripe from
Markus Bertheau that that wasn't possible.
2006-08-03 20:57:06 +00:00
Tom Lane 2d0c1d3102 Documentation fixes for FILLFACTOR patch. Minor other editorialization. 2006-07-04 18:07:24 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 277807bd9e Add FILLFACTOR to CREATE INDEX.
ITAGAKI Takahiro
2006-07-02 02:23:23 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 8c092781f4 ALTER TABLE ... ADD/DROPS INHERIT (actually INHERIT / NO INHERIT)
Open items:

There were a few tangentially related issues that have come up that I think
are TODOs. I'm likely to tackle one or two of these next so I'm interested in
hearing feedback on them as well.

. Constraints currently do not know anything about inheritance. Tom suggested
  adding a coninhcount and conislocal like attributes have to track their
  inheritance status.

. Foreign key constraints currently do not get copied to new children (and
  therefore my code doesn't verify them). I don't think it would be hard to
  add them and treat them like CHECK constraints.

. No constraints at all are copied to tables defined with LIKE. That makes it
  hard to use LIKE to define new partitions. The standard defines LIKE and
  specifically says it does not copy constraints. But the standard already has
  an option called INCLUDING DEFAULTS; we could always define a non-standard
  extension LIKE table INCLUDING CONSTRAINTS that gives the user the option to
  request a copy including constraints.

. Personally, I think the whole attislocal thing is bunk. The decision about
  whether to drop a column from children tables or not is something that
  should be up to the user and trying to DWIM based on whether there was ever
  a local definition or the column was acquired purely through inheritance is
  hardly ever going to match up with user expectations.

. And of course there's the whole unique and primary key constraint issue. I
  think to get any traction at all on this you have a prerequisite of a real
  partitioned table implementation where the system knows what the partition
  key is so it can recognize when it's a leading part of an index key.

Greg Stark
2006-07-02 01:58:36 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 04a2b54c09 Revert patch becaues of locking concerns:
Allow ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT ... RENAME

Joachim Wieland
2006-02-12 19:11:01 +00:00
Bruce Momjian a02f6ce33b Allow ALTER TABLE ... ALTER CONSTRAINT ... RENAME
Joachim Wieland
2006-02-11 22:17:19 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 04db9d25d1 there's a paragraph in the ALTER TABLE reference page that reads:
DROP CONSTRAINT

    This form drops constraints on a table. Currently, constraints on tables
    are not required to have unique names, so there may be more than one
    constraint matching the specified name. All matching constraints will be
    dropped.

To my knowledge, it is no longer possible to create constraints with the
same name for the same relation. When you create a constraint and specify
the same name explictly, an error is raised. Implicit constraint creation
won't choose an existing name either and up to now you could not rename a
constraint. Renaming works with the patch I sent in a few hours ago but this
patch as well won't allow constraints with identical names on the same
relation.

The attached patch thus removes the note in the docs.

Joachim Wieland
2005-12-08 21:35:36 +00:00
Tom Lane 130b2dd8ea Add documentation for ALTER TABLE ENABLE/DISABLE TRIGGER. 2005-08-24 17:24:19 +00:00
Bruce Momjian ae94f10397 Update documentation that non-super users can now do ALTER OWNER. 2005-08-22 21:32:01 +00:00
Tom Lane 33f5bf9700 ALTER TABLE OWNER must change the ownership of the table's rowtype too.
This was not especially critical before, but it is now that we track
ownership dependencies --- the dependency for the rowtype *must* shift
to the new owner.  Spotted by Bernd Helmle.
Also fix a problem introduced by recent change to allow non-superusers
to do ALTER OWNER in some cases: if the table had a toast table, ALTER
OWNER failed *even for superusers*, because the test being applied would
conclude that the new would-be owner had no create rights on pg_toast.
A side-effect of the fix is to disallow changing the ownership of indexes
or toast tables separately from their parent table, which seems a good
idea on the whole.
2005-08-04 01:09:29 +00:00
Tom Lane f58434f18f Documentation for ALTER object SET SCHEMA commands. Also some minor
editorialization.
2005-08-01 16:11:14 +00:00
Tom Lane a294726bc1 Incorporate examples and doc patches from Mark Kirkwood and David Fetter. 2005-01-14 01:16:52 +00:00
Tom Lane ab3bb9cf78 Add some real documentation about TOAST (finally). Combine this with
the old 'page' chapter and the recently added 'filelayout' chapter to
make a coherent chapter about PostgreSQL's physical storage layout.
2005-01-10 00:04:43 +00:00
Tom Lane 4e94ea9fc9 More minor updates and copy-editing. 2005-01-04 00:39:53 +00:00
Tom Lane 9309d5f2ba In ALTER COLUMN TYPE, strip any implicit coercion operations appearing
at the top level of the column's old default expression before adding
an implicit coercion to the new column type.  This seems to satisfy the
principle of least surprise, as per discussion of bug #1290.
2004-10-22 17:20:05 +00:00
Tom Lane af4de81469 ALTER TABLE SET TABLESPACE. Gavin Sherry, some rework by Tom Lane. 2004-07-11 23:13:58 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 36ae5efab1 Improve without cluster wording. 2004-06-02 21:04:40 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 1cdc58722c OK, here's the final version of ALTER TABLE ... SET WITHOUT CLUSTER.
Has docs + regression test.

Christopher Kings-Lynne
2004-06-02 21:01:10 +00:00
Tom Lane c792cbcc26 Recommend ALTER TABLE ... TYPE as the best way to reclaim space occupied by deleted columns. The old method involving UPDATE and VACUUM FULL will be considerably less efficient. 2004-05-27 03:30:11 +00:00
Tom Lane 077db40fa1 ALTER TABLE rewrite. New cool stuff:
* ALTER ... ADD COLUMN with defaults and NOT NULL constraints works per SQL
spec.  A default is implemented by rewriting the table with the new value
stored in each row.

* ALTER COLUMN TYPE.  You can change a column's datatype to anything you
want, so long as you can specify how to convert the old value.  Rewrites
the table.  (Possible future improvement: optimize no-op conversions such
as varchar(N) to varchar(N+1).)

* Multiple ALTER actions in a single ALTER TABLE command.  You can perform
any number of column additions, type changes, and constraint additions with
only one pass over the table contents.

Basic documentation provided in ALTER TABLE ref page, but some more docs
work is needed.

Original patch from Rod Taylor, additional work from Tom Lane.
2004-05-05 04:48:48 +00:00
Neil Conway ce5273757b Make a cross-reference in the ALTER TABLE ref page into a <xref>. 2004-03-24 09:49:20 +00:00
Tom Lane 24614a9880 Upgrade ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN so that it can drop an OID column, and
remove separate implementation of ALTER TABLE SET WITHOUT OIDS in favor
of doing a regular DROP.  Also, cause CREATE TABLE to account completely
correctly for the inheritance status of the OID column.  This fixes
problems with dropping OID columns that have dependencies, as noted by
Christopher Kings-Lynne, as well as making sure that you can't drop an
OID column that was inherited from a parent.
2004-03-23 19:35:17 +00:00
Neil Conway 80ec228389 Refer to GUC variables using <xref> tags rather than <varname> tags,
where appropriate. Add "id" and "xreflabel" tags to the descriptions
of the GUC variables to facilitate this. Also make a few minor docs
cleanups.
2004-03-09 16:57:47 +00:00
Neil Conway 1a6a27650d Add a few more xrefs, where they seemed appropriate: for example, refer
to the discussion of planner statistics in the documentation for the
default_statistics_target GUC var.
2004-03-01 17:58:39 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 7ce9b7c0d8 This patch adds a new GUC var, "default_with_oids", which follows the
proposal for eventually deprecating OIDs on user tables that I posted
earlier to pgsql-hackers. pg_dump now always specifies WITH OIDS or
WITHOUT OIDS when dumping a table. The documentation has been updated.

Neil Conway
2003-12-01 22:08:02 +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 d4019b7cd3 Remove a bunch of content-free Diagnostics sections, as per previous
discussion.  (Still have some work to do editing the remainder.)
2003-09-09 18:28:53 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut c326d8f4f2 Add/edit index entries. 2003-08-31 17:32:24 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 7c084d148f Bring SQL ref pages to consistent format, part 1. 2003-04-15 13:25:08 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 5e5c5cd31a Merge documentation into one book. (Build with "make html".) Replace
vague cross-references with real links.
2003-03-25 16:15:44 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 432b9b0f75 Add ALTER TABLE <tablename> CLUSTER ON <indexname>
Alvaro Herrera
2003-03-20 18:52:48 +00:00
Bruce Momjian cde8bbc413 This patch makes the following changes to the documentation:
- more work from the SGML police

- some grammar improvements: rewriting a paragraph or two, replacing
contractions where (IMHO) appropriate

- fix missing utility commands in lock mode docs

- improve CLUSTER, REINDEX, SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION ref pages

Neil Conway
2003-02-19 04:06:28 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 8195f8f042 Code for WITHOUT OIDS.
On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 21:59, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> I agree.  I want to remove OIDs from heaps of our tables when we go to 7.3.
> I'd rather not have to do it in the dump due to down time.


Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>
2003-02-13 05:20:05 +00:00
Bruce Momjian be2b660ecd This patch includes a lot of minor cleanups to the SGML documentation,
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
2003-01-19 00:13:31 +00:00
Tom Lane 9cecff0314 Document that zero-column tables are allowed (and non-standard). 2002-12-16 19:08:25 +00:00
Tom Lane 272bf59d29 Fix inconsistent formatting. 2002-10-19 23:09:20 +00:00
Tom Lane 93dca0d224 Fix incomplete definition of ALTER TABLE ADD/DROP CONSTRAINT syntax.
Add some verbiage about recent tweaks to behavior of ADD and DROP
COLUMN when there are descendant tables.
2002-10-19 22:51:45 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut bc49968764 Add more appropriate markup. 2002-09-21 18:32:54 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 88bd306832 > Neil Conway <nconway@klamath.dyndns.org> writes:
> > 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
2002-08-15 02:59:18 +00:00
Tom Lane 38bb77a5d1 ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN works. Patch by Christopher Kings-Lynne,
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.
2002-08-02 18:15:10 +00:00
Tom Lane ce7565ab91 Instead of having a configure-time DEFAULT_ATTSTATTARGET, store -1 in
attstattarget to indicate 'use the default'.  The default is now a GUC
variable default_statistics_target, and so may be changed on the fly.  Along
the way we gain the ability to have pg_dump dump the per-column statistics
target when it's not the default.  Patch by Neil Conway, with some kibitzing
from Tom Lane.
2002-07-31 17:19:54 +00:00
Tom Lane 7c6df91dda Second phase of committing Rod Taylor's pg_depend/pg_constraint patch.
pg_relcheck is gone; CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, and FOREIGN KEY
constraints all have real live entries in pg_constraint.  pg_depend
exists, and RESTRICT/CASCADE options work on most kinds of DROP;
however, pg_depend is not yet very well populated with dependencies.
(Most of the ones that are present at this point just replace formerly
hardwired associations, such as the implicit drop of a relation's pg_type
entry when the relation is dropped.)  Need to add more logic to create
dependency entries, improve pg_dump to dump constraints in place of
indexes and triggers, and add some regression tests.
2002-07-12 18:43:19 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut 2c50f6344b Revise command completion tags as per hackers message on 20 March. 2002-05-18 15:44:48 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 19b31e0713 Oops, wrong commit on previous. It was:
The attached patch allows views to have default values. You can't
specify a default value within a CREATE VIEW statement, it must be
done using ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET DEFAULT after the
view has already been created. Most of the hard work was done by
Tom Lane, I just patched pg_dump and updated the documentation.

Neil Conway <neilconway@rogers.com>
2002-04-24 02:40:45 +00:00
Tom Lane 0c1fe3d2b9 Update SQL-command reference pages for schema features. 2002-04-23 02:07:16 +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
Tom Lane 9b77f61930 ALTER TABLE SET/DROP NOT NULL, from Christopher Kings-Lynne. 2002-04-01 04:35:40 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 62e6eb9bf7 alter table doc cleanups.
Neil Conway
2002-03-06 20:42:38 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 03194432de I attach a version of my toast-slicing patch, against current CVS
(current as of a few hours ago.)

This patch:

1. Adds PG_GETARG_xxx_P_SLICE() macros and associated support routines.

2. Adds routines in src/backend/access/tuptoaster.c for fetching only
necessary chunks of a toasted value. (Modelled on latest changes to
assume chunks are returned in order).

3. Amends text_substr and bytea_substr to use new methods. It now
handles multibyte cases -and should still lead to a performance
improvement in the multibyte case where the substring is near the
beginning of the string.

4. Added new command: ALTER TABLE tabname ALTER COLUMN colname SET
STORAGE {PLAIN | EXTERNAL | EXTENDED | MAIN} to parser and documented in
alter-table.sgml. (NB I used ColId as the item type for the storage
mode string, rather than a new production - I hope this makes sense!).
All this does is sets attstorage for the specified column.

4. AlterTableAlterColumnStatistics is now AlterTableAlterColumnFlags and
handles both statistics and storage (it uses the subtype code to
distinguish). The previous version of my patch also re-arranged other
code in backend/commands/command.c but I have dropped that from this
patch.(I plan to return to it separately).

5. Documented new macros (and also the PG_GETARG_xxx_P_COPY macros) in
xfunc.sgml. ref/alter_table.sgml also contains documentation for ALTER
COLUMN SET STORAGE.

John Gray
2002-03-05 05:33:31 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 62feef6c95 Fix SGML typo in previous patch. 2002-02-17 13:29:00 +00:00
Bruce Momjian bf4507e3af I think it's important that it's actually documented that they can add
primary keys after the fact!

Also, we need to add regression tests for alter table / add primary key
and alter table / drop constraint.  These shouldn't be added until 7.3
tho
methinks...

Chris
2002-02-17 11:50:09 +00:00
Bruce Momjian a966ac1df0 Clarify params to ALTER TABLE to clearly show single parameters.
e.g. table contraint definition -> table_constraint_definition.
2002-02-16 23:45:48 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut bf43bed848 Spell-check and markup police 2002-01-20 22:19:57 +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
Bruce Momjian ed19b9149a Add mention that ALTER TABLE RENAME affects indexes and sequences too. 2001-11-22 03:42:32 +00:00