This patch adds the SQL-standard concept of an INSTEAD OF trigger, which
is fired instead of performing a physical insert/update/delete. The
trigger function is passed the entire old and/or new rows of the view,
and must figure out what to do to the underlying tables to implement
the update. So this feature can be used to implement updatable views
using trigger programming style rather than rule hacking.
In passing, this patch corrects the names of some columns in the
information_schema.triggers view. It seems the SQL committee renamed
them somewhere between SQL:99 and SQL:2003.
Dean Rasheed, reviewed by Bernd Helmle; some additional hacking by me.
it works just as well to have them be ordinary identifiers, and this gets rid
of a number of ugly special cases. Plus we aren't interfering with non-rule
usage of these names.
catversion bump because the names change internally in stored rules.
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".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
RETURNING play nice with views/rules. To wit, have the rule rewriter
rewrite any RETURNING clause found in a rule to produce what the rule's
triggering query asked for in its RETURNING clause, in particular drop
the RETURNING clause if no RETURNING in the triggering query. This
leaves the responsibility for knowing how to produce the view's output
columns on the rule author, without requiring any fundamental changes
in rule semantics such as adding new rule event types would do. The
initial implementation constrains things to ensure that there is
exactly one, unconditionally invoked RETURNING clause among the rules
for an event --- later we might be able to relax that, but for a post
feature freeze fix it seems better to minimize how much invention we do.
Per gripe from Jaime Casanova.
compatibility for release 7.2 and earlier. I have not altered any
mentions of release 7.3 or later. The release notes were not modified,
so the changes are still documented, just not in the main docs.
rather than being reordered according to INSTEAD attribute for
implementation convenience.
Also, increase compiled-in recursion depth limit from 10 to 100 rewrite
cycles. 10 seems pretty marginal for situations where multiple rules
exist for the same query. There was a complaint about this recently,
so I'm going to bump it up. (Perhaps we should make the limit a GUC
parameter, but that's too close to being a new feature to do in beta.)
in cases of qualified rules as well as unqualified ones. Tweak rules
test to avoid cluttering output with dummy SELECT results. Update
documentation to match code.