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".
FAMILY; and add FAMILY option to CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to allow adding a
class to a pre-existing family. Per previous discussion. Man, what a
tedious lot of cutting and pasting ...
columns procost and prorows, to allow simple user adjustment of the estimated
cost of a function call, as well as control of the estimated number of rows
returned by a set-returning function. We might eventually wish to extend this
to allow function-specific estimation routines, but there seems to be
consensus that we should try a simple constant estimate first. In particular
this provides a relatively simple way to control the order in which different
WHERE clauses are applied in a plan node, which is a Good Thing in view of the
fact that the recent EquivalenceClass planner rewrite made that much less
predictable than before.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
an optarg). Add some comments noting that code in three different files has
to be kept in sync. Fix erroneous description of -S switch (it sets work_mem
not silent_mode), and do some light copy-editing elsewhere in postgres-ref.
cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator families". While most
families are equivalent to a single class, related classes can be grouped
into one family to represent the fact that they are semantically compatible.
Cross-type operators are now naturally adjunct parts of a family, without
having to wedge them into a particular opclass as we had done originally.
This commit restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of the work
needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come later. Also,
there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands; the only way
to create a new family right now is to allow CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make
one by default. I owe some more documentation work, too. But that can all
be done in smaller pieces once this infrastructure is in place.
in normal operation, and we can avoid rewriting pg_control at every log
segment switch if we don't insist that these values be valid. Reducing
the number of pg_control updates is a good idea for both performance and
reliability. It does make pg_resetxlog's life a bit harder, but that seems
a good tradeoff; and anyway the change to pg_resetxlog amounts to automating
something people formerly needed to do by hand, namely look at the existing
pg_xlog files to make sure the new WAL start point was past them.
In passing, change the wording of xlog.c's "database system was interrupted"
messages: describe the pg_control timestamp as "last known up at" rather than
implying it is the exact time of service interruption. With this change the
timestamp will generally be the time of the last checkpoint, which could be
many minutes before the failure; and we've already seen indications that
people tend to misinterpret the old wording.
initdb forced due to change in pg_control layout. Simon Riggs and Tom Lane
locks that logically should not be released, because when a subtransaction
overwrites XMAX all knowledge of the previous lock state is lost. It seems
unlikely that we will be able to fix this before 8.3...
in PITR scenarios. We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases. Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId. Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done. Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database. initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs. Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.
reference pages documenting that these commands cannot be used within
a transaction block. Also make some minor improvements to the psql
reference page. Patch from Simon Riggs, minor editorialization by
myself.
