Per bug #14441 from Mark Pether, the documentation could be misread,
mainly because some of the examples failed to show what happens with
a multicharacter "characters to trim" string. Also, while the text
description in most of these entries was fairly clear that the
"characters" argument is a set of characters not a substring to match,
some of them used variant wording that was a bit less clear.
trim() itself suffered from both deficiencies and was thus pretty
misinterpretable.
Also fix failure to explain which of LEADING/TRAILING/BOTH is the
default.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161130011710.6539.53657@wrigleys.postgresql.org
The documentation around the -b/--blobs option to pg_dump seemed to
imply that it might be possible to add blobs to a "schema-only" dump or
similar. Clarify that blobs are data and therefore will only be
included in dumps where data is being included, even when -b is used to
request blobs be included.
The -b option has been around since before 9.2, so back-patch to all
supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161119173316.GA13284@tamriel.snowman.net
Before commit 906bfcad7, we were not actually processing the righthand
side of a multiple-column assignment in UPDATE as a row constructor:
it was just a parenthesized list of expressions. Call it that rather
than risking confusion by people who would expect the documented behaviors
of row constructors to apply.
Back-patch to 9.5; before that, the text correctly described the construct
as a "list of independent expressions".
Discussion: <16288.1479610770@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Create a section specifically for the syntactic rules around whole-row
variable usage, such as expansion of "foo.*". This was previously
documented only haphazardly, with some critical info buried in
unexpected places like xfunc-sql-composite-functions. Per repeated
questions in different mailing lists.
Discussion: <16288.1479610770@sss.pgh.pa.us>
There are assorted references to RETURNING in Part II, but nothing
that would qualify as an explanation of the feature, which seems
like an oversight considering how useful it is. Add something.
Noted while looking for a place to point a cross-reference to ...
Commit 3c4cf08087 should have removed SET TABLESPACE from the synopsis
of ALTER MATERIALIZE VIEW as a possible "action" when it added a
separate line for it in the main command listing, but failed to.
Repair.
Backpatch to 9.4, like the aforementioned commit.
For a very long time, pltcl's spi_exec and spi_execp commands have had
a behavior of storing the current row number as an element of output
arrays, but this was never documented. Fix that.
For an equally long time, pltcl_trigger_handler had a behavior of silently
ignoring ".tupno" as an output column name, evidently so that the result
of spi_exec could be used directly as a trigger result tuple. Not sure
how useful that really is, but in any case it's bad that it would break
attempts to use ".tupno" as an actual column name. We can fix it by not
checking for ".tupno" until after we check for a column name match. This
comports with the effective behavior of spi_exec[p] that ".tupno" is only
magic when you don't have an actual column named that.
In passing, wordsmith the description of returning modified tuples from
a pltcl trigger.
Noted while working on Jim Nasby's patch to support composite results
from pltcl. The inability to return trigger tuples using ".tupno" as
a column name is a bug, so back-patch to all supported branches.
In the previous coding, if an aggregate's transition function returned an
expanded array, nodeAgg.c and nodeWindowAgg.c would always copy it and thus
force it into the flat representation. This led to ping-ponging between
flat and expanded formats, which costs a lot. For an aggregate using
array_append as transition function, I measured about a 15X slowdown
compared to the pre-9.5 code, when working on simple int[] arrays.
Of course, the old code was already O(N^2) in this usage due to copying
flat arrays all the time, but it wasn't quite this inefficient.
To fix, teach nodeAgg.c and nodeWindowAgg.c to allow expanded transition
values without copying, so long as the transition function takes care to
return the transition value already properly parented under the aggcontext.
That puts a bit of extra responsibility on the transition function, but
doing it this way allows us to not need any extra logic in the fast path
of advance_transition_function (ie, with a pass-by-value transition value,
or with a modified-in-place pass-by-reference value). We already know
that that's a hot spot so I'm loath to add any cycles at all there. Also,
while only array_append currently knows how to follow this convention,
this solution allows other transition functions to opt-in without needing
to have a whitelist in the core aggregation code.
(The reason we would need a whitelist is that currently, if you pass a
R/W expanded-object pointer to an arbitrary function, it's allowed to do
anything with it including deleting it; that breaks the core agg code's
assumption that it should free discarded values. Returning a value under
aggcontext is the transition function's signal that it knows it is an
aggregate transition function and will play nice. Possibly the API rules
for expanded objects should be refined, but that would not be a
back-patchable change.)
With this fix, an aggregate using array_append is no longer O(N^2), so it's
much faster than pre-9.5 code rather than much slower. It's still a bit
slower than the bespoke infrastructure for array_agg, but the differential
seems to be only about 10%-20% rather than orders of magnitude.
Discussion: <6315.1477677885@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Clarify documentation about inheritance of check constraints, in
particular mentioning the NO INHERIT option, which didn't exist when
this text was written.
Document that in an inherited query, the applicable row security policies
are those of the explicitly-named table, not its children. This is the
intended behavior (per off-list discussion with Stephen Frost), and there
are regression tests for it, but it wasn't documented anywhere user-facing
as far as I could find.
Do a bit of wordsmithing on the description of inherited access-privilege
checks.
Back-patch to 9.5 where RLS was added.
Show how to get the system's huge page size, rather than misleadingly
referring to PAGE_SIZE (which is usually understood to be the regular
page size). Show how to confirm whether huge pages have been allocated.
Minor wordsmithing. Back-patch to 9.4 where this section appeared.
Replace "Full path to ..." with "Full path name of ...". At least one
user has misinterpreted the existing wording as meaning "Directory
containing ...".
It was perhaps not entirely clear that internal self-references shouldn't
be schema-qualified even if the view name is written with a schema.
Spell it out.
Discussion: <871sznz69m.fsf@metapensiero.it>
Evidently an oversight in commit 729205571. Back-patch to 9.2 where
privileges for types were introduced.
Report: <20160922173517.8214.88959@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
These worked as-is until around 7.0, but fail in newer versions because
there are more operators named "#". Besides it's a bit inconsistent that
only two of the examples on this page lack type names on their constants.
Report: <20160923081530.1517.75670@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Standardize on "user_name" for a field name in related examples in
ddl.sgml; before we had variously "user_name", "username", and "user".
The last is flat wrong because it conflicts with a reserved word.
Be consistent about entry capitalization in a table in func.sgml.
Fix a typo in pgtrgm.sgml.
Back-patch to 9.6 and 9.5 as relevant.
Alexander Law
Mostly, explain how row xmin's used to be replaced by FrozenTransactionId
and no longer are. Do a little copy-editing on the side.
Per discussion with Egor Rogov. Back-patch to 9.4 where the behavioral
change occurred.
Discussion: <575D7955.6060209@postgrespro.ru>
Previously, we threw an error if a dynamic timezone abbreviation did not
match any abbreviation recorded in the referenced IANA time zone entry.
That seemed like a good consistency check at the time, but it turns out
that a number of the abbreviations in the IANA database are things that
Olson and crew made up out of whole cloth. Their current policy is to
remove such names in favor of using simple numeric offsets. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, a lot of these made-up abbreviations have varied in meaning
over time, which meant that our commit b2cbced9e and later changes made
them into dynamic abbreviations. So with newer IANA database versions
that don't mention these abbreviations at all, we fail, as reported in bug
#14307 from Neil Anderson. It's worse than just a few unused-in-the-wild
abbreviations not working, because the pg_timezone_abbrevs view stops
working altogether (since its underlying function tries to compute the
whole view result in one call).
We considered deleting these abbreviations from our abbreviations list, but
the problem with that is that we can't stay ahead of possible future IANA
changes. Instead, let's leave the abbreviations list alone, and treat any
"orphaned" dynamic abbreviation as just meaning the referenced time zone.
It will behave a bit differently than it used to, in that you can't any
longer override the zone's standard vs. daylight rule by using the "wrong"
abbreviation of a pair, but that's better than failing entirely. (Also,
this solution can be interpreted as adding a small new feature, which is
that any abbreviation a user wants can be defined as referencing a time
zone name.)
Back-patch to all supported branches, since this problem affects all
of them when using tzdata 2016f or newer.
Report: <20160902031551.15674.67337@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Discussion: <6189.1472820913@sss.pgh.pa.us>
The decision to reuse values of parameters from a previous connection
has been based on whether the new target is a conninfo string. Add this
means of overriding that default. This feature arose as one component
of a fix for security vulnerabilities in pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and
pg_upgrade, so back-patch to 9.1 (all supported versions). In 9.3 and
later, comment paragraphs that required update had already-incorrect
claims about behavior when no connection is open; fix those problems.
Security: CVE-2016-5424
If ANALYZE found no repeated non-null entries in its sample, it set the
column's stadistinct value to -1.0, intending to indicate that the entries
are all distinct. But what this value actually means is that the number
of distinct values is 100% of the table's rowcount, and thus it was
overestimating the number of distinct values by however many nulls there
are. This could lead to very poor selectivity estimates, as for example
in a recent report from Andreas Joseph Krogh. We should discount the
stadistinct value by whatever we've estimated the nulls fraction to be.
(That is what will happen if we choose to use a negative stadistinct for
a column that does have repeated entries, so this code path was just
inconsistent.)
In addition to fixing the stadistinct entries stored by several different
ANALYZE code paths, adjust the logic where get_variable_numdistinct()
forces an "all distinct" estimate on the basis of finding a relevant unique
index. Unique indexes don't reject nulls, so there's no reason to assume
that the null fraction doesn't apply.
Back-patch to all supported branches. Back-patching is a bit of a judgment
call, but this problem seems to affect only a few users (else we'd have
identified it long ago), and it's bad enough when it does happen that
destabilizing plan choices in a worse direction seems unlikely.
Patch by me, with documentation wording suggested by Dean Rasheed
Report: <VisenaEmail.26.df42f82acae38a58.156463942b8@tc7-visena>
Discussion: <16143.1470350371@sss.pgh.pa.us>
In 9.5, two arguments were introduced into pg_replication_origin_xact_reset()
by mistake while they are actually not used at all. We cannot fix this issue
for 9.5 anymore because it needs a catalog version bump. Instead, we add
a note about those unused arguments into the document.
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
The help message for pg_basebackup specifies that the numbers 0 through 9
are accepted as valid values of -Z option. But, previously -Z 0 was rejected
as an invalid compression level.
Per discussion, it's better to make pg_basebackup treat 0 as valid
compression level meaning no compression, like pg_dump.
Back-patch to all supported versions.
Reported-By: Jeff Janes
Reviewed-By: Amit Kapila
Discussion: CAMkU=1x+GwjSayc57v6w87ij6iRGFWt=hVfM0B64b1_bPVKRqg@mail.gmail.com
This text was added by commit ff213239c, and not long thereafter obsoleted
by commit 4adc2f72a (which made the test depend on NBuffers instead); but
nobody noticed the need for an update. Commit 9563d5b5e adds some further
dependency on maintenance_work_mem, but the existing verbiage seems to
cover that with about as much precision as we really want here. Let's
just take it all out rather than leaving ourselves open to more errors of
omission in future. (That solution makes this change back-patchable, too.)
Noted by Peter Geoghegan.
Discussion: <CAM3SWZRVANbj9GA9j40fAwheQCZQtSwqTN1GBTVwRrRbmSf7cg@mail.gmail.com>
The docs failed to explain that LIKE INCLUDING INDEXES would not preserve
the names of indexes and associated constraints. Also, it wasn't mentioned
that EXCLUDE constraints would be copied by this option. The latter
oversight seems enough of a documentation bug to justify back-patching.
In passing, do some minor copy-editing in the same area, and add an entry
for LIKE under "Compatibility", since it's not exactly a faithful
implementation of the standard's feature.
Discussion: <20160728151154.AABE64016B@smtp.hushmail.com>
The description of udt_privileges view contained an incorrect copy-pasted word.
Back-patch to 9.2 where udt_privileges view was added.
Author: Alexander Law
The SQL standard appears to specify that IS [NOT] NULL's tests of field
nullness are non-recursive, ie, we shouldn't consider that a composite
field with value ROW(NULL,NULL) is null for this purpose.
ExecEvalNullTest got this right, but eval_const_expressions did not,
leading to weird inconsistencies depending on whether the expression
was such that the planner could apply constant folding.
Also, adjust the docs to mention that IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM NULL can be
used as a substitute test if a simple null check is wanted for a rowtype
argument. That motivated reordering things so that IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM
is described before IS [NOT] NULL. In HEAD, I went a bit further and added
a table showing all the comparison-related predicates.
Per bug #14235. Back-patch to all supported branches, since it's certainly
undesirable that constant-folding should change the semantics.
Report and patch by Andrew Gierth; assorted wordsmithing and revised
regression test cases by me.
Report: <20160708024746.1410.57282@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
9.4 added a second description of GET DIAGNOSTICS that was totally
independent of the existing one, resulting in each description lying to the
extent that it claimed the set of status items it described was complete.
Fix that, and do some minor markup improvement.
Also some other small fixes per bug #14258 from Dilian Palauzov.
Discussion: <20160718181437.1414.40802@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Tom Lane
Stephen Frost
Magnus Hagander
Alvaro Herrera
Peter Eisentraut
Simon Riggs
Noah Misch
Fujii Masao
Bruce Momjian