You're required to write either RANGE or ROWS to start a frame clause,
but the documentation incorrectly implied this is optional. Noted by
David Johnston.
The possibility that constant subexpressions of a CASE might be evaluated
at planning time was touched on in 9.17.1 (CASE expressions), but it really
ought to be explained in 4.2.14 (Expression Evaluation Rules) which is the
primary discussion of such topics. Add text and an example there, and
revise the <note> under CASE to link there.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since it's acted like this for a
long time (though 9.2+ is probably worse because of its more aggressive
use of constant-folding via replanning of nominally-prepared statements).
Pre-9.4, also back-patch text added in commit 0ce627d4 about CASE versus
aggregate functions.
Tom Lane and David Johnston, per discussion of bug #12273.
These things didn't work because the planner omitted to do the necessary
preprocessing of a WindowFunc's argument list. Add the few dozen lines
of code needed to handle that.
Although this sounds like a feature addition, it's really a bug fix because
the default-argument case was likely to crash previously, due to lack of
checking of the number of supplied arguments in the built-in window
functions. It's not a security issue because there's no way for a
non-superuser to create a window function definition with defaults that
refers to a built-in C function, but nonetheless people might be annoyed
that it crashes rather than producing a useful error message. So
back-patch as far as the patch applies easily, which turns out to be 9.2.
I'll put a band-aid in earlier versions as a separate patch.
(Note that these features still don't work for aggregates, and fixing that
case will be harder since we represent aggregate arg lists as target lists
not bare expression lists. There's no crash risk though because CREATE
AGGREGATE doesn't accept defaults, and we reject named-argument notation
when parsing an aggregate call.)
For rather inscrutable reasons, SQL:2008 disallows copying-and-modifying a
window definition that has any explicit framing clause. The error message
we gave for this only made sense if the referencing window definition
itself contains an explicit framing clause, which it might well not.
Moreover, in the context of an OVER clause it's not exactly obvious that
"OVER (windowname)" implies copy-and-modify while "OVER windowname" does
not. This has led to multiple complaints, eg bug #5199 from Iliya
Krapchatov. Change to a hopefully more intelligible error message, and
in the case where we have just "OVER (windowname)", add a HINT suggesting
that omitting the parentheses will fix it. Also improve the related
documentation. Back-patch to all supported branches.
This is so that these sections will have stable HTML tags that one can
link to, rather than things like "AEN1902". Perhaps we should mount a
campaign to do this everywhere, but I've found myself pointing at
syntax.sgml subsections often enough to be sure it's useful here.
We'll now use "exists" for EXISTS(SELECT ...), "array" for ARRAY(SELECT
...), or the sub-select's own result column name for a simple expression
sub-select. Previously, you usually got "?column?" in such cases.
Marti Raudsepp, reviewed by Kyotaro Horiugchi
Per gripe from Grzegorz Szpetkowski.
Also, change the subsection heading from "Lexical Precedence" (which is
a contradiction in terms) to "Operator Precedence".
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.
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.
functionality, while creating an ambiguity in usage with ORDER BY that at
least two people have already gotten seriously confused by. Also, add an
opr_sanity test to check that we don't in future violate the newly minted
policy of not having built-in aggregates with the same name and different
numbers of parameters. Per discussion of a complaint from Thom Brown.
"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.
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 patch allows the frame to start from CURRENT ROW (in either RANGE or
ROWS mode), and it also adds support for ROWS n PRECEDING and ROWS n FOLLOWING
start and end points. (RANGE value PRECEDING/FOLLOWING isn't there yet ---
the grammar works, but that's all.)
Hitoshi Harada, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
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
it works just as well to have them be ordinary identifiers, and this gets rid
of a number of ugly special cases. Plus we aren't interfering with non-rule
usage of these names.
catversion bump because the names change internally in stored rules.
so that their elements are always taken as simple expressions over the
query's input columns. It originally seemed like a good idea to make them
act exactly like GROUP BY and ORDER BY, right down to the SQL92-era behavior
of accepting output column names or numbers. However, that was not such a
great idea, for two reasons:
1. It permits circular references, as exhibited in bug #5018: the output
column could be the one containing the window function itself. (We actually
had a regression test case illustrating this, but nobody thought twice about
how confusing that would be.)
2. It doesn't seem like a good idea for, eg, "lead(foo) OVER (ORDER BY foo)"
to potentially use two completely different meanings for "foo".
Accordingly, narrow down the behavior of window clauses to use only the
SQL99-compliant interpretation that the expressions are simple expressions.
patch. This includes the ability to force the frame to cover the whole
partition, and the ability to make the frame end exactly on the current row
rather than its last ORDER BY peer. Supporting any more of the full SQL
frame-clause syntax will require nontrivial hacking on the window aggregate
code, so it'll have to wait for 8.5 or beyond.
