This is more SQL-spec-compliant, more easily extensible, and better
performing than the old method of inventing special variables.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada and David Wheeler
This allows the usual rules for assigning a collation to a local variable
to be overridden. Per discussion, it seems appropriate to support this
rather than forcing all local variables to have the argument-derived
collation.
As noted by Thom Brown, this confuses the DocBook index processor; it
fails to merge entries that differ only in whitespace, and sorts them
unexpectedly as well. Seems like a toolchain bug, but I'm not going to
hold my breath waiting for a fix.
Note: easiest way to find these is to look for double spaces in HTML.index.
(I'm not entirely sure that we've finished bikeshedding the syntax details,
but the functionality seems OK.)
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Stephen Frost and Tom Lane
Currently, three conversion format specifiers are supported: %s for a
string, %L for an SQL literal, and %I for an SQL identifier. The latter
two are deliberately designed not to overlap with what sprintf() already
supports, in case we want to add more of sprintf()'s functionality here
later.
Patch by Pavel Stehule, heavily revised by me. Reviewed by Jeff Janes
and, in earlier versions, by Itagaki Takahiro and Tom Lane.
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.
can be caught in the same places that could catch an ordinary RAISE ERROR
in the same location. The previous coding insisted on throwing the error
from the block containing the active exception handler; which is arguably
more surprising, and definitely unlike Oracle's behavior.
Not back-patching, since this is a pretty obscure corner case. The risk
of breaking somebody's code in a minor version update seems to outweigh
any possible benefit.
Piyush Newe, reviewed by David Fetter
Block elements with verbatim formatting (literallayout, programlisting,
screen, synopsis) should be aligned at column 0 independent of the surrounding
SGML, because whitespace is significant, and indenting them creates erratic
whitespace in the output. The CSS stylesheets already take care of indenting
the output.
Assorted markup improvements to go along with it.
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.
This is the last EXECUTE-like plpgsql statement that was missing
the capability of inserting parameter values via USING.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Itagaki Takahiro
default be "throw error on conflict", as per discussions. The GUC variable
is plpgsql.variable_conflict, with values "error", "use_variable",
"use_column". The behavior can also be specified per-function by inserting
one of
#variable_conflict error
#variable_conflict use_variable
#variable_conflict use_column
at the start of the function body.
The 8.5 release notes will need to mention using "use_variable" to retain
backward-compatible behavior, although we should encourage people to migrate
to the much less mistake-prone "error" setting.
Update the plpgsql documentation to match this and other recent changes.
behavior, and is so little used that no one has been interested in fixing it.
To ensure that possible uses are covered, remove the ALIAS declaration's
arbitrary restriction that only $n identifiers can be aliased.
(We could alternatively make RENAME act just like ALIAS, but per discussion
having two different ways to do the same thing is probably more confusing than
helpful.)
never a BEGIN block. This is required for Oracle compatibility and is
also plainly stated to be the behavior by our original documentation
(up until 8.1, in which the docs were adjusted to match the code's behavior;
but actually the old docs said the correct thing and the code was wrong).
Not back-patched because this introduces an incompatibility that could
break working applications. Requires release note.
more nearly matching the core SQL scanner. The user-visible effects are:
* Block comments (slash-star comments) now nest, as per SQL spec.
* In standard_conforming_strings mode, backslash as the last character of a
non-E string literal is now correctly taken as an ordinary character;
formerly it was misinterpreted as escaping the ending quote. (Since the
string also had to pass through the core scanner, this invariably led
to syntax errors.)
* Formerly, backslashes in the format string of RAISE were always treated as
quoting the next character, regardless of mode. Now, they are ordinary
characters with standard_conforming_strings on, while with it off, they
introduce the same set of escapes as in the core SQL scanner. Also,
escape_string_warning is now effective for RAISE format strings. These
changes make RAISE format strings work just like any other string literal.
This is implemented by copying and pasting a lot of logic from the core
scanner. It would be a good idea to look into getting rid of plpgsql's
scanner entirely in favor of using the core scanner. However, that involves
more change than I can justify making during beta --- in particular, the core
scanner would have to become re-entrant.
In passing, remove the kluge that made the plpgsql scanner emit T_FUNCTION or
T_TRIGGER as a made-up first token. That presumably had some value once upon
a time, but now it's just useless complication for both the scanner and the
grammar.
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.
via a tuplestore instead of value-per-call. Refactor a few things to reduce
ensuing code duplication with nodeFunctionscan.c. This represents the
reasonably noncontroversial part of my proposed patch to switch SQL functions
over to returning tuplestores. For the moment, SQL functions still do things
the old way. However, this change enables PL SRFs to be called in targetlists
(observe changes in plperl regression results).
so long as all the trailing arguments are of the same (non-array) type.
The function receives them as a single array argument (which is why they
have to all be the same type).
It might be useful to extend this facility to aggregates, but this patch
doesn't do that.
This patch imposes a noticeable slowdown on function lookup --- a follow-on
patch will fix that by adding a redundant column to pg_proc.
Pavel Stehule
HINT fields to a user-thrown error message, and to specify the SQLSTATE
error code to use. The syntax has also been tweaked so that the
Oracle-compatible case "RAISE exception_name" works (though you won't get a
very nice error message if you just write that much). Lastly, support
the Oracle-compatible syntax "RAISE" with no parameters to re-throw
the current error from within an EXCEPTION block.
In passing, allow the syntax SQLSTATE 'nnnnn' within EXCEPTION lists,
so that there is a way to trap errors with custom SQLSTATE codes.
Pavel Stehule and Tom Lane
except that it returns the string 'NULL', rather than a SQL null, when called
with a null argument. This is often a much more useful behavior for
constructing dynamic queries. Add more discussion to the documentation
about how to use these functions.
Brendan Jurd
sugar for PL/PgSQL set-returning functions that want to return the result
of evaluating a query; it should also be more efficient than repeated
RETURN NEXT statements. Based on an earlier patch from Pavel Stehule.
name. With this patch, it is always possible for the user to qualify a
plpgsql variable name if needed to avoid ambiguity. While there is much more
work to be done in this area, this simple change removes one unnecessary
incompatibility with Oracle. Per discussion.
of variable substitution and plan caching behavior in dedicated sections.
(A lot of this material existed already, but was scattered in various places
in the chapter.) Reorganize material a little bit, mostly to try to avoid
diving into deep details in the first introductory sections. Document some
fine points that had escaped treatment before, notably the ability to qualify
plpgsql variable names with block labels. Some minor wordsmithing here and
there.
with a plpgsql-defined cursor. The underlying mechanism for this is that the
main SQL engine will now take "WHERE CURRENT OF $n" where $n is a refcursor
parameter. Not sure if we should document that fact or consider it an
implementation detail. Per discussion with Pavel Stehule.
were accepted by prior Postgres releases. This takes care of the loose end
left by the preceding patch to downgrade implicit casts-to-text. To avoid
breaking desirable behavior for array concatenation, introduce a new
polymorphic pseudo-type "anynonarray" --- the added concatenation operators
are actually text || anynonarray and anynonarray || text.
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.
more, and standard_conforming_strings less, because in the future non-E
strings will not treat backslashes specially.
Also use E'' strings where backslashes are used in examples. (The
existing examples would have drawn warnings.)
Backpatch to 8.2.X.
merely a matter of fixing the error check, since the underlying Portal
infrastructure already handles it. This in turn allows these statements
to be used in some existing plpgsql and plperl contexts, such as a
plpgsql FOR loop. Also, do some marginal code cleanup in places that
were being sloppy about distinguishing SELECT from SELECT INTO.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Add dynamic record inspection to PL/PgSQL, useful for generic triggers:
tval2 := r.(cname);
or
columns := r.(*);
Titus von Boxberg
An article at WebProNews quoted from the PG docs as to the merits of
stored procedures. I have added a bit more material on their merits,
as well as making a few changes to improve the introductions to
PL/Perl and PL/Tcl.
Chris Browne
