INTERSECT and EXCEPT is available for postgresql-v6.4!
The patch against v6.4 is included at the end of the current text
(in uuencoded form!)
I also included the text of my Master's Thesis. (a postscript
version). I hope that you find something of it useful and would be
happy if parts of it find their way into the PostgreSQL documentation
project (If so, tell me, then I send the sources of the document!)
The contents of the document are:
-) The first chapter might be of less interest as it gives only an
overview on SQL.
-) The second chapter gives a description on much of PostgreSQL's
features (like user defined types etc. and how to use these features)
-) The third chapter starts with an overview of PostgreSQL's internal
structure with focus on the stages a query has to pass (i.e. parser,
planner/optimizer, executor). Then a detailed description of the
implementation of the Having clause and the Intersect/Except logic is
given.
Originally I worked on v6.3.2 but never found time enough to prepare
and post a patch. Now I applied the changes to v6.4 to get Intersect
and Except working with the new version. Chapter 3 of my documentation
deals with the changes against v6.3.2, so keep that in mind when
comparing the parts of the code printed there with the patched sources
of v6.4.
Here are some remarks on the patch. There are some things that have
still to be done but at the moment I don't have time to do them
myself. (I'm doing my military service at the moment) Sorry for that
:-(
-) I used a rewrite technique for the implementation of the Except/Intersect
logic which rewrites the query to a semantically equivalent query before
it is handed to the rewrite system (for views, rules etc.), planner,
executor etc.
-) In v6.3.2 the types of the attributes of two select statements
connected by the UNION keyword had to match 100%. In v6.4 the types
only need to be familiar (i.e. int and float can be mixed). Since this
feature did not exist when I worked on Intersect/Except it
does not work correctly for Except/Intersect queries WHEN USED IN
COMBINATION WITH UNIONS! (i.e. sometimes the wrong type is used for the
resulting table. This is because until now the types of the attributes of
the first select statement have been used for the resulting table.
When Intersects and/or Excepts are used in combination with Unions it
might happen, that the first select statement of the original query
appears at another position in the query which will be executed. The reason
for this is the technique used for the implementation of
Except/Intersect which does a query rewrite!)
NOTE: It is NOT broken for pure UNION queries and pure INTERSECT/EXCEPT
queries!!!
-) I had to add the field intersect_clause to some data structures
but did not find time to implement printfuncs for the new field.
This does NOT break the debug modes but when an Except/Intersect
is used the query debug output will be the already rewritten query.
-) Massive changes to the grammar rules for SELECT and INSERT statements
have been necessary (see comments in gram.y and documentation for
deatails) in order to be able to use mixed queries like
(SELECT ... UNION (SELECT ... EXCEPT SELECT)) INTERSECT SELECT...;
-) When using UNION/EXCEPT/INTERSECT you will get:
NOTICE: equal: "Don't know if nodes of type xxx are equal".
I did not have time to add comparsion support for all the needed nodes,
but the default behaviour of the function equal met my requirements.
I did not dare to supress this message!
That's the reason why the regression test for union will fail: These
messages are also included in the union.out file!
-) Somebody of you changed the union_planner() function for v6.4
(I copied the targetlist to new_tlist and that was removed and
replaced by a cleanup of the original targetlist). These chnages
violated some having queries executed against views so I changed
it back again. I did not have time to examine the differences between the
two versions but now it works :-)
If you want to find out, try the file queries/view_having.sql on
both versions and compare the results . Two queries won't produce a
correct result with your version.
regards
Stefan
I put some extra checks to make sure a query was a good candidate for
rewrite into a UNION. Besides the existing checks:
1. Make sure the AND/OR tree was rectangular. ( i.e. 3 X 4 or 10 X
3)
2. Only one table.
3. Must have an AND dimension.
4. At least 9 OP expressions total
Also cleaned up and commented.
[AC_MSG_RESULT(yes) AC_DEFINE(HAVE_LONG_INT_64)],
this line produces something like:
echo "$ac_t""yes" 1>&6 cat >> confdefs.h <<\EOF
and would append garbage "yes cat" to confdefs.h. Of course the
result confdefs.h is not syntactically correct therefore following
tests using confdefs.h would all fail. To avoid the problem, we
could switch the order of AC_MSG_RESULT and AC_DEFINE (see attached
patch). This happend on my LinuxPPC box.
Tatsuo Ishii t-ishii@sra.co.jp
patch is applied:
Rewrite rules on relation level work fine now.
Event qualifications on insert/update/delete rules work
fine now.
I added the new keyword OLD to reference the CURRENT
tuple. CURRENT will be removed in 6.5.
Update rules can reference NEW and OLD in the rule
qualification and the actions.
Insert/update/delete rules on views can be established to
let them behave like real tables.
For insert/update/delete rules multiple actions are
supported now. The actions can also be surrounded by
parantheses to make psql happy. Multiple actions are
required if update to a view requires updates to multiple
tables.
Regular users are permitted to create/drop rules on
tables they have RULE permissions for
(DefineQueryRewrite() is now able to get around the
access restrictions on pg_rewrite). This enables view
creation for regular users too. This required an extra
boolean parameter to pg_parse_and_plan() that tells to
set skipAcl on all rangetable entries of the resulting
queries. There is a new function
pg_exec_query_acl_override() that could be used by
backend utilities to use this facility.
All rule actions (not only views) inherit the permissions
of the event relations owner. Sample: User A creates
tables T1 and T2, creates rules that log
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE on T1 in T2 (like in the regression
tests for rules I created) and grants ALL but RULE on T1
to user B. User B can now fully access T1 and the
logging happens in T2. But user B cannot access T2 at
all, only the rule actions can. And due to missing RULE
permissions on T1, user B cannot disable logging.
Rules on the attribute level are disabled (they don't
work properly and since regular users are now permitted
to create rules I decided to disable them).
Rules on select must have exactly one action that is a
select (so select rules must be a view definition).
UPDATE NEW/OLD rules are disabled (still broken, but
triggers can do it).
There are two new system views (pg_rule and pg_view) that
show the definition of the rules or views so the db admin
can see what the users do. They use two new functions
pg_get_ruledef() and pg_get_viewdef() that are builtins.
The functions pg_get_ruledef() and pg_get_viewdef() could
be used to implement rule and view support in pg_dump.
PostgreSQL is now the only database system I know, that
has rewrite rules on the query level. All others (where I
found a rule statement at all) use stored database
procedures or the like (triggers as we call them) for
active rules (as some call them).
Future of the rule system:
The now disabled parts of the rule system (attribute
level, multiple actions on select and update new stuff)
require a complete new rewrite handler from scratch. The
old one is too badly wired up.
After 6.4 I'll start to work on a new rewrite handler,
that fully supports the attribute level rules, multiple
actions on select and update new. This will be available
for 6.5 so we get full rewrite rule capabilities.
Jan
no longer returns buffer pointer, can be gotten from scan;
descriptor; bootstrap can create multi-key indexes;
pg_procname index now is multi-key index; oidint2, oidint4, oidname
are gone (must be removed from regression tests); use System Cache
rather than sequential scan in many places; heap_modifytuple no
longer takes buffer parameter; remove unused buffer parameter in
a few other functions; oid8 is not index-able; remove some use of
single-character variable names; cleanup Buffer variables usage
and scan descriptor looping; cleaned up allocation and freeing of
tuples; 18k lines of diff;
indices for restriction clauses containing a constant.
Note that if an index does not match directly (usually because the types
on both side of the clause don't match), and if a binary-compatible index
is identified, then the operator function will be replaced by a new
one. Should not be a problem, but be sure that if types are listed as
being binary compatible (in parse_coerce.h) then the comparison functions
are also binary-compatible, giving equivalent results.
