GIN had some minor issues too, mostly using "internal" where something
else would be more appropriate. I went with the same approach as in
9ff60273e3, namely preferring the opclass' indexed datatype for
arguments that receive an operator RHS value, even if that's not
necessarily what they really are.
Again, this is with an eye to having a uniform rule for ginvalidate()
to check support function signatures.
The conventions specified by the GiST SGML documentation were widely
ignored. For example, the strategy-number argument for "consistent" and
"distance" functions is specified to be a smallint, but most of the
built-in support functions declared it as an integer, and for that matter
the core code passed it using Int32GetDatum not Int16GetDatum. None of
that makes any real difference at runtime, but it's quite confusing for
newcomers to the code, and it makes it very hard to write an amvalidate()
function that checks support function signatures. So let's try to instill
some consistency here.
Another similar issue is that the "query" argument is not of a single
well-defined type, but could have different types depending on the strategy
(corresponding to search operators with different righthand-side argument
types). Some of the functions threw up their hands and declared the query
argument as being of "internal" type, which surely isn't right ("any" would
have been more appropriate); but the majority position seemed to be to
declare it as being of the indexed data type, corresponding to a search
operator with both input types the same. So I've specified a convention
that that's what to do always.
Also, the result of the "union" support function actually must be of the
index's storage type, but the documentation suggested declaring it to
return "internal", and some of the functions followed that. Standardize
on telling the truth, instead.
Similarly, standardize on declaring the "same" function's inputs as
being of the storage type, not "internal".
Also, somebody had forgotten to add the "recheck" argument to both
the documentation of the "distance" support function and all of their
SQL declarations, even though the C code was happily using that argument.
Clean that up too.
Fix up some other omissions in the docs too, such as documenting that
union's second input argument is vestigial.
So far as the errors in core function declarations go, we can just fix
pg_proc.h and bump catversion. Adjusting the erroneous declarations in
contrib modules is more debatable: in principle any change in those
scripts should involve an extension version bump, which is a pain.
However, since these changes are purely cosmetic and make no functional
difference, I think we can get away without doing that.
The new format accepts exactly the same data as the json type. However, it is
stored in a format that does not require reparsing the orgiginal text in order
to process it, making it much more suitable for indexing and other operations.
Insignificant whitespace is discarded, and the order of object keys is not
preserved. Neither are duplicate object keys kept - the later value for a given
key is the only one stored.
The new type has all the functions and operators that the json type has,
with the exception of the json generation functions (to_json, json_agg etc.)
and with identical semantics. In addition, there are operator classes for
hash and btree indexing, and two classes for GIN indexing, that have no
equivalent in the json type.
This feature grew out of previous work by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev, which
was intended to provide similar facilities to a nested hstore type, but which
in the end proved to have some significant compatibility issues.
Authors: Oleg Bartunov, Teodor Sigaev, Peter Geoghegan and Andrew Dunstan.
Review: Andres Freund
Tom Lane
Andrew Dunstan