postgresql/src/test/regress

Introduction

  The PostgreSQL regression tests are a comprehensive set of tests for the
  SQL implementation embedded in PostgreSQL developed by Jolly Chen and
  Andrew Yu. It tests standard SQL operations as well as the extensibility
  capabilities of PostgreSQL.

  These tests have recently been revised by Marc Fournier and others to
  become current for PostgreSQL v6.1. The tests are now packaged as
  functional units and should be easier to run and easier to interpret.

  Some properly installed and fully functional PostgreSQL installations
  can fail these regression tests due to artifacts of the genetic optimizer.
  See the v6.1-specific release notes in this document for further details.

Preparation

  The regression test is invoked by the 'make' command which compiles
  a 'c' program with PostgreSQL extension functions into a shared library
  in the current directory.  Localized shell scripts are also created in
  the current directory. The output file templates are massaged into the
  ./expected/*.out files.  The localization replaces macros in the source
  files with absolute pathnames and user names.

  The postmaster should be invoked with the system time zone set for
  Berkeley, California. On some systems, this can be accomplished by
  setting the TZ environment variable before starting the postmaster
  (for csh/bash; use set/export for some other shells):

    setenv TZ PST8PDT7,M04.01.0,M10.05.03
    /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -s

Directory Layout

  input/ .... .source files that are converted using 'make all' into
              some of the .sql files in the 'sql' subdirectory

  output/ ... .source files that are converted using 'make all' into
              .out files in the 'expected' subdirectory

  sql/ ...... .sql files used to perform the regression tests

  expected/ . .out files that represent what we *expect* the results to
              look like

  results/ .. .out files that represent what the results *actually* look
              like. Also used as temporary storage for table copy testing.

Running the regression test

  If you have prevously invoked the regression test, clean up the
  working directory with:

        make clean

  The regression test is invoked with the command:

        make all runtest

  Normally, the regression test should be run as the pg_superuser as the
  'src/test/regress' directory and sub-directories are owned by the
  pg_superuser. If you run the regression test as another user the
  'src/test/regress' directory tree should be writeable to that user.

Comparing expected/actual output

  The results are in the files in the ./results directory. These
  results can be compared with results in the ./expected directory
  using 'diff'. The files might not compare exactly. The following
  paragraphs attempt to explain the differences.

OID differences

  There are several places where PostgreSQL OID (object identifiers) appear
  in 'regress.out'. OID's are unique 32-bit integers which are generated
  by the PostgreSQL backend whenever a table row is inserted or updated.
  If you run the regression test on a non-virgin database or run it multiple
  times, the OID's reported will have different values. 

  The following SQL statements in 'misc.out' have shown this behavior:

  QUERY: SELECT user_relns() AS user_relns ORDER BY user_relns;

    The 'a,523676' row is composed from an OID.

TIME differences

  Some of the tests involving date/time functions use the implicit
  time zone in effect at the time the regression test is run. In other
  tests the timezone to be inserted into the regression data base is
  explicitly specified.

  The 'expected.input' file was prepared in the 'US/Pacific' timezone
  so there may be differences where the 'expected.out' file has
  PST/PDT times and the 'regress.out' file has your local timezone.

FLOATING POINT differences

  Some of the tests involve computing 64-bit (FLOAT8) number from table
  columns. Differences in results involving mathematical functions of
  FLOAT8 columns have been observed. These differences occur where
  different operating systems are used on the same platform ie:
  BSDI and SOLARIS on Intel/86, and where the same operating system is
  used used on different platforms, ie: SOLARIS on SPARC and Intel/86.

  Human eyeball comparison is needed to determine the real significance
  of these differences which are usually 10 places to the right of
  the decimal point.

POLYGON differences

  Several of the tests involve operations on geographic date about the
  Oakland/Berkley CA street map. The map data is expressed as polygons
  whose vertices are represented as pairs of FLOAT8 numbers (decimal
  latitude and longitude). Initially, some tables are created and
  loaded with geographic data, then some views are created which join
  two tables using the polygon intersection operator (##), then a select
  is done on the view. 

  When comparing the results from different platforms, differences occur
  in the 2nd or 3rd place to the right of the decimal point. The SQL
  statements where these problems occur are the folowing:

    QUERY: SELECT * from street;
    QUERY: SELECT * from iexit;

DATE/TIME differences

  On many supported platforms, you can force PostgreSQL to believe that it
  is running in the same time zone as Berkeley, California. See details in
  the section on how to run the regression tests.

  The Makefile attempts to adjust for timezone differences, but it is
  not possible to totally eliminate them.  People outside North America
  will probabablly find the Makefile's adjustments are incorrect.  Also
  entries that use the time -infinity display with year 1970 plus/minus the
  number of hours you are different from GMT.

Random differences

  There is at least one test case in misc.out which is intended to produce
  random results. This causes misc to fail the regression testing.
  Typing "diff results/misc.out expected/misc.out" should produce only
  one or a few lines of differences for this reason, but other floating
  point differences on dissimilar architectures might cause many more
  differences.

The 'expected' files

  The ./expected/*.out files were adapted from the original monolithic
  'expected.input' file provided by Jolly Chen et al. Newer versions of these
  files generated on various development machines have been substituted after
  careful (?) inspection. Many of the development machines are running a
  Unix OS variant (FreeBSD, Linux, etc) on Ix86 hardware.

  The original 'expected.input' file was created on a SPARC Solaris 2.4
  system using the 'postgres5-1.02a5.tar.gz' source tree. It was compared
  with a file created on an I386 Solaris 2.4 system and the differences
  were only in the floating point polygons in the 3rd digit to the right
  of the decimal point. (see below)

  The original 'sample.regress.out' file was from the postgres-1.01 release
  constructed by Jolly Chen and is included here for reference. It may
  have been created on a DEC ALPHA machine as the 'Makefile.global'
  in the postgres-1.01 release has PORTNAME=alpha.

Current release notes

  There are no release notes for PostgreSQL v6.0.

v6.1beta release notes

  The regression tests have been adapted and extensively modified for the
  v6.1 release of PostgreSQL.

  Three new data types (datetime, timespan, and circle) have been added to
  the native set of PostgreSQL types. Points, boxes, paths, and polygons
  have had their output formats improved, but the old-style input formats
  are accepted by v6.1. The source data files have not been updated to the
  new formats, but should be for the next release. The polygon output in
  misc.out has only been spot-checked for correctness relative to the
  original regression output.

  To get consistant results from the regression tests, compile the PostgreSQL
  backend with the genetic optimizer (GEQ) turned off. The genetic algorithms
  introduce a random behavior in the output ordering which causes the
  simple "diff" implementation of the tests to fail. To turn off the genetic
  optimizer, edit the src/include/config.h file and comment-out the line
  containing "#define GEQ", then do a "make clean install" to regenerate
  the backend. Existing v6.1 databases are not affected by the choice of
  optimizer, so there is no need to reload after changing the optimizer.
  The new genetic optimizer has very nice performance with many-table joins,
  so you may want to make sure to re-enable it and reinstall the code after
  you have concluded your regression testing.

XXX update this for the production release - tgl 97/04/26
  The interpretation of array specifiers (the curly braces around atomic
  values) appears to have changed sometime after the original regression
  tests were generated. The current ./expected/*.out files reflect this
  new interpretation, which may not be correct!

XXX update this for the production release - tgl 97/04/26
  The float8 regression test fails. This may be due to the parser continuing
  rather than aborting when given invalid constants for input values.

XXX update this for the production release - tgl 97/04/26
  Regression tests involving indexed tables fail in at least some environments.
  This may indicate a problem with the current index code.