This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set
aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in
SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(),
percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the
spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that
can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data.
Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting
process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the
support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API
function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of
the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the
immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to
install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that
infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up.
In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic
aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER
additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by
allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT.
It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types
but not these.
Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing,
and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
Formerly the planner had a hard-wired rule of thumb for guessing the amount
of space consumed by an aggregate function's transition state data. This
estimate is critical to deciding whether it's OK to use hash aggregation,
and in many situations the built-in estimate isn't very good. This patch
adds a column to pg_aggregate wherein a per-aggregate estimate can be
provided, overriding the planner's default, and infrastructure for setting
the column via CREATE AGGREGATE.
It may be that additional smarts will be required in future, perhaps even
a per-aggregate estimation function. But this is already a step forward.
This is extracted from a larger patch to improve the performance of numeric
and int8 aggregates. I (tgl) thought it was worth reviewing and committing
this infrastructure separately. In this commit, all built-in aggregates
are given aggtransspace = 0, so no behavior should change.
Hadi Moshayedi, reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Tomas Vondra
There's no inherent reason why an aggregate function can't be variadic
(even VARIADIC ANY) if its transition function can handle the case.
Indeed, this patch to add the feature touches none of the planner or
executor, and little of the parser; the main missing stuff was DDL and
pg_dump support.
It is true that variadic aggregates can create the same sort of ambiguity
about parameters versus ORDER BY keys that was complained of when we
(briefly) had both one- and two-argument forms of string_agg(). However,
the policy formed in response to that discussion only said that we'd not
create any built-in aggregates with varying numbers of arguments, not that
we shouldn't allow users to do it. So the logical extension of that is
we can allow users to make variadic aggregates as long as we're wary about
shipping any such in core.
In passing, this patch allows aggregate function arguments to be named, to
the extent of remembering the names in pg_proc and dumping them in pg_dump.
You can't yet call an aggregate using named-parameter notation. That seems
like a likely future extension, but it'll take some work, and it's not what
this patch is really about. Likewise, there's still some work needed to
make window functions handle VARIADIC fully, but I left that for another
day.
initdb forced because of new aggvariadic field in Aggref parse nodes.
This adds support for the more or less SQL-conforming USAGE privilege
on types and domains. The intent is to be able restrict which users
can create dependencies on types, which restricts the way in which
owners can alter types.
reviewed by Yeb Havinga
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.
another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
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".
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.
CREATE AGGREGATE aggname (input_type) (parameter_list)
along with the old syntax where the input type was named in the parameter
list. This fits more naturally with the way that the aggregate is identified
in DROP AGGREGATE and other utility commands; furthermore it has a natural
extension to handle multiple-input aggregates, where the basetype-parameter
method would get ugly. In fact, this commit fixes the grammar and all the
utility commands to support multiple-input aggregates; but DefineAggregate
rejects it because the executor isn't fixed yet.
I didn't do anything about treating agg(*) as a zero-input aggregate instead
of artificially making it a one-input aggregate, but that should be considered
in combination with supporting multi-input aggregates.
be supported for all datatypes. Add CREATE AGGREGATE and pg_dump support
too. Add specialized min/max aggregates for bpchar, instead of depending
on text's min/max, because otherwise the possible use of bpchar indexes
cannot be recognized.
initdb forced because of catalog changes.
including:
- replacing all the appropriate usages of <citetitle>PostgreSQL
...</citetitle> with &cite-user;, &cite-admin;, and so on
- fix an omission in the EXECUTE documentation
- add some more text to the EXPLAIN documentation
- improve the PL/PgSQL RETURN NEXT documentation (more work to do here)
- minor markup fixes
Neil Conway
capabilities of specifying time zones as intervals per SQL9x.
Put refentrytitle contents on the same line as the tag.
Otherwise, leading whitespace is propagated into the product, which
(at least) messes up the ToC layout.
Remove (some) docinfo tags containing dates. Best to omit if the dates
are not accurate; maybe use CVS dates instead or leave them out.
entries, per pghackers discussion. This fixes aggregates to live in
namespaces, and also simplifies/speeds up lookup in parse_func.c.
Also, add a 'proimplicit' flag to pg_proc that controls whether a type
coercion function may be invoked implicitly, or only explicitly. The
current settings of these flags are more permissive than I would like,
but we will need to debate and refine the behavior; for now, I avoided
breaking regression tests as much as I could.
There's now only one transition value and transition function.
NULL handling in aggregates is a lot cleaner. Also, use Numeric
accumulators instead of integer accumulators for sum/avg on integer
datatypes --- this avoids overflow at the cost of being a little slower.
Implement VARIANCE() and STDDEV() aggregates in the standard backend.
Also, enable new LIKE selectivity estimators by default. Unrelated
change, but as long as I had to force initdb anyway...
No big deal; fixed lots of other markup at the same time.
Bigest change: make sure there is no whitespace
in front of <term> contents.
This will probably help the other output types too.
