For a very long time, one of the parser's heuristics for resolving
ambiguous operator calls has been to assume that unknown-type literals are
of the same type as the other input (if it's known). However, this was
only used in the first step of quickly checking for an exact-types match,
and thus did not help in resolving matches that require coercion, such as
matches to polymorphic operators. As we add more polymorphic operators,
this becomes more of a problem. This patch adds another use of the same
heuristic as a last-ditch check before failing to resolve an ambiguous
operator or function call. In particular this will let us define the range
inclusion operator in a less limited way (to come in a follow-on patch).
Remove crude hack that tried to propagate collation through a
function-returning-record, ie, from the function's arguments to individual
fields selected from its result record. That is just plain inconsistent,
because the function result is composite and cannot have a collation;
and there's no hope of making this kind of action-at-a-distance work
consistently. Adjust regression test cases that expected this to happen.
Meanwhile, the behavior of casting to a domain with a declared collation
stays the same as it was, since that seemed to be the consensus.
All expression nodes now have an explicit output-collation field, unless
they are known to only return a noncollatable data type (such as boolean
or record). Also, nodes that can invoke collation-aware functions store
a separate field that is the collation value to pass to the function.
This avoids confusion that arises when a function has collatable inputs
and noncollatable output type, or vice versa.
Also, replace the parser's on-the-fly collation assignment method with
a post-pass over the completed expression tree. This allows us to use
a more complex (and hopefully more nearly spec-compliant) assignment
rule without paying for it in extra storage in every expression node.
Fix assorted bugs in the planner's handling of collations by making
collation one of the defining properties of an EquivalenceClass and
by converting CollateExprs into discardable RelabelType nodes during
expression preprocessing.
The initial collations patch treated a COLLATE spec as part of a TypeName,
following what can only be described as brain fade on the part of the SQL
committee. It's a lot more reasonable to treat COLLATE as a syntactically
separate object, so that it can be added in only the productions where it
actually belongs, rather than needing to reject it in a boatload of places
where it doesn't belong (something the original patch mostly failed to do).
In addition this change lets us meet the spec's requirement to allow
COLLATE anywhere in the clauses of a ColumnDef, and it avoids unfriendly
behavior for constructs such as "foo::type COLLATE collation".
To do this, pull collation information out of TypeName and put it in
ColumnDef instead, thus reverting most of the collation-related changes in
parse_type.c's API. I made one additional structural change, which was to
use a ColumnDef as an intermediate node in AT_AlterColumnType AlterTableCmd
nodes. This provides enough room to get rid of the "transform" wart in
AlterTableCmd too, since the ColumnDef can carry the USING expression
easily enough.
Also fix some other minor bugs that have crept in in the same areas,
like failure to copy recently-added fields of ColumnDef in copyfuncs.c.
While at it, document the formerly secret ability to specify a collation
in ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN TYPE, ALTER TYPE ADD ATTRIBUTE, and
ALTER TYPE ALTER ATTRIBUTE TYPE; and correct some misstatements about
what the default collation selection will be when COLLATE is omitted.
BTW, the three-parameter form of format_type() should go away too,
since it just contributes to the confusion in this area; but I'll do
that in a separate patch.
This adds collation support for columns and domains, a COLLATE clause
to override it per expression, and B-tree index support.
Peter Eisentraut
reviewed by Pavel Stehule, Itagaki Takahiro, Robert Haas, Noah Misch
PG 8.4 added a built-in feature for casting pretty much any data type to
string types (text, varchar, etc). We allowed this to work in any of the
historically-allowed syntaxes: CAST(x AS text), x::text, text(x), or
x.text. However, multiple complaints have shown that it's too easy to
invoke such casts unintentionally in the latter two styles, particularly
field selection. To cure the problem with the narrowest possible change
of behavior, disallow use of I/O conversion casts from composite types to
string types via functional/attribute syntax. The new functionality is
still available via cast syntax.
In passing, document the equivalence of functional and attribute syntax
in a more visible place.
matching a call like f(x, ORDER BY y,z). It could be that what the user
really wants is f(x,z ORDER BY y). We now have pretty conclusive evidence
that many people won't understand this problem without concrete guidance,
so give it to them. Per further discussion of the string_agg() problem.
look through join alias Vars to avoid breaking join queries, and
move the test to someplace where it will catch more possible ways
of calling a function. We still ought to throw away the whole thing
in favor of a data-type-based solution, but that's not feasible in
the back branches.
This needs to be back-patched further than 9.0, but I don't have time
to do so today. Committing now so that the fix gets into 9.0beta4.
"val AS name" to "name := val", as per recent discussion.
This patch catches everything in the original named-parameters patch,
but I'm not certain that no other dependencies snuck in later (grepping
the source tree for all uses of AS soon proved unworkable).
In passing I note that we've dropped the ball at least once on keeping
ecpg's lexer (as opposed to parser) in sync with the backend. It would
be a good idea to go through all of pgc.l and see if it's in sync now.
I didn't attempt that at the moment.
to transformAggregateCall, instead of abusing fields in Aggref to carry them
temporarily. No change in functionality but hopefully the code is a bit
clearer now. Per gripe from Gokulakannan Somasundaram.
The purpose of this change is to eliminate the need for every caller
of SearchSysCache, SearchSysCacheCopy, SearchSysCacheExists,
GetSysCacheOid, and SearchSysCacheList to know the maximum number
of allowable keys for a syscache entry (currently 4). This will
make it far easier to increase the maximum number of keys in a
future release should we choose to do so, and it makes the code
shorter, too.
Design and review by Tom Lane.
non-kluge method for controlling the order in which values are fed to an
aggregate function. At the same time eliminate the old implementation
restriction that DISTINCT was only supported for single-argument aggregates.
Possibly release-notable behavioral change: formerly, agg(DISTINCT x)
dropped null values of x unconditionally. Now, it does so only if the
agg transition function is strict; otherwise nulls are treated as DISTINCT
normally would, ie, you get one copy.
Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada
recent proposal. As proof of concept, remove knowledge of Params from the
core parser, arranging for them to be handled entirely by parser hook
functions. It turns out we need an additional hook for that --- I had
forgotten about the code that handles inferring a parameter's type from
context.
This is a preliminary step towards letting plpgsql handle its variables
through parser hooks. Additional work remains to be done to expose the
facility through SPI, but I think this is all the changes needed in the core
parser.
by extending the ereport() API to cater for pluralization directly. This
is better than the original method of calling ngettext outside the elog.c
code because (1) it avoids double translation, which wastes cycles and in
the worst case could give a wrong result; and (2) it avoids having to use
a different coding method in PL code than in the core backend. The
client-side uses of ngettext are not touched since neither of these concerns
is very pressing in the client environment. Per my proposal of yesterday.
find_inheritance_children() and find_all_inheritors(). I got annoyed that
these are buried inside the planner but mostly used elsewhere. So, create
a new file catalog/pg_inherits.c and put them there, along with a couple
of other functions that search pg_inherits.
The code that modifies pg_inherits is (still) in tablecmds.c --- it's
kind of entangled with unrelated code that modifies pg_depend and other
stuff, so pulling it out seemed like a bigger change than I wanted to make
right now. But this file provides a natural home for it if anyone ever
gets around to that.
This commit just moves code around; it doesn't change anything, except
I succumbed to the temptation to make a couple of trivial optimizations
in typeInheritsFrom().
In the backend, I changed only a handful of exemplary or important-looking
instances to make use of the plural support; there is probably more work
there. For the rest of the source, this should cover all relevant cases.
most node types used in expression trees (both before and after parse
analysis). This allows us to place an error cursor in many situations
where we formerly could not, because the information wasn't available
beyond the very first level of parse analysis. There's a fair amount
of work still to be done to persuade individual ereport() calls to actually
include an error location, but this gets the initdb-forcing part of the
work out of the way; and the situation is already markedly better than
before for complaints about unimplementable implicit casts, such as
CASE and UNION constructs with incompatible alternative data types.
Per my proposal of a few days ago.
into nodes/nodeFuncs, so as to reduce wanton cross-subsystem #includes inside
the backend. There's probably more that should be done along this line,
but this is a start anyway.
with system catalog lookups, as was foreseen to be necessary almost since
their creation. Instead put the information into two new pg_type columns,
typcategory and typispreferred. Add support for setting these when
creating a user-defined base type.
The category column is just a "char" (i.e. a poor man's enum), allowing
a crude form of user extensibility of the category list: just use an
otherwise-unused character. This seems sufficient for foreseen uses,
but we could upgrade to having an actual category catalog someday, if
there proves to be a huge demand for custom type categories.
In this patch I have attempted to hew exactly to the behavior of the
previous hardwired logic, except for introducing new type categories for
arrays, composites, and enums. In particular the default preferred state
for user-defined types remains TRUE. That seems worth revisiting, but it
should be done as a separate patch from introducing the infrastructure.
Likewise, any adjustment of the standard set of categories should be done
separately.
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
checking of argument compatibility right; although the problem is only exposed
with multiple-input aggregates in which some arguments are polymorphic and
some are not. Per bug #3852 from Sokolov Yura.
even in code paths where we don't pay any subsequent attention to the typmod
value. This seems needed in view of the fact that 8.3's generalized typmod
support will accept a lot of bogus syntax, such as "timestamp(foo)" or
"record(int, 42)" --- if we allow such things to pass without comment,
users will get confused. Per a recent example from Greg Stark.
To implement this in a way that's not very vulnerable to future
bugs-of-omission, refactor the API of parse_type.c's TypeName lookup routines
so that typmod validation is folded into the base lookup operation. Callers
can still choose not to receive the encoded typmod, but we'll check the
decoration anyway if it's present.
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.
from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions. These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.
The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible. This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.
This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation. Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
seen by code inspecting the expression. The best way to do this seems
to be to drop the original representation as a function invocation, and
instead make a special expression node type that represents applying
the element-type coercion function to each array element. In this way
the element function is exposed and will be checked for volatility.
Per report from Guillaume Smet.
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.
the opportunity to treat COUNT(*) as a zero-argument aggregate instead
of the old hack that equated it to COUNT(1); this is materially cleaner
(no more weird ANYOID cases) and ought to be at least a tiny bit faster.
Original patch by Sergey Koposov; review, documentation, simple regression
tests, pg_dump and psql support by moi.
