yesterday's proposal to pghackers. Also remove unnecessary parameters
to heap_beginscan, heap_rescan. I modified pg_proc.h to reflect the
new numbers of parameters for the AM interface routines, but did not
force an initdb because nothing actually looks at those fields.
per previous discussion on pghackers. Most of the duplicate code in
different AMs' ambuild routines has been moved out to a common routine
in index.c; this means that all index types now do the right things about
inserting recently-dead tuples, etc. (I also removed support for EXTEND
INDEX in the ambuild routines, since that's about to go away anyway, and
it cluttered the code a lot.) The retail indextuple deletion routines have
been replaced by a "bulk delete" routine in which the indexscan is inside
the access method. I haven't pushed this change as far as it should go yet,
but it should allow considerable simplification of the internal bookkeeping
for deletions. Also, add flag columns to pg_am to eliminate various
hardcoded tests on AM OIDs, and remove unused pg_am columns.
Fix rtree and gist index types to not attempt to store NULLs; before this,
gist usually crashed, while rtree managed not to crash but computed wacko
bounding boxes for NULL entries (which might have had something to do with
the performance problems we've heard about occasionally).
Add AtEOXact routines to hash, rtree, and gist, all of which have static
state that needs to be reset after an error. We discovered this need long
ago for btree, but missed the other guys.
Oh, one more thing: concurrent VACUUM is now the default.
Changes:
* Unique index capability works using the syntax 'create unique
index'.
* Duplicate OID's in the system tables are removed. I put
little scripts called 'duplicate_oids' and 'find_oid' in
include/catalog that help to find and remove duplicate OID's.
I also moved 'unused_oids' from backend/catalog to
include/catalog, since it has to be in the same directory
as the include files in order to work.
* The backend tries converting the name of a function or aggregate
to all lowercase if the original name given doesn't work (mostly
for compatibility with ODBC).
* You can 'SELECT NULL' to your heart's content.
* I put my _bt_updateitem fix in instead, which uses
_bt_insertonpg so that even if the new key is so big that
the page has to be split, everything still works.
* All literal references to system catalog OID's have been
replaced with references to define'd constants from the catalog
header files.
* I added a couple of node copy functions. I think this was a
preliminary attempt to get rules to work.