ORDER BY expressions were being treated the same as regular aggregate
arguments for purposes of collation determination, but really they should
not affect the aggregate's collation at all; only collations of the
aggregate's regular arguments should affect it.
In many cases this mistake would lead to incorrectly throwing a "collation
conflict" error; but in some cases the corrected code will silently assign
a different collation to the aggregate than before, for example
agg(foo ORDER BY bar COLLATE "x")
which will now use foo's collation rather than "x" for the aggregate.
Given this risk and the lack of field complaints about the issue, it
doesn't seem prudent to back-patch.
In passing, rearrange code in assign_collations_walker so that we don't
need multiple copies of the standard logic for computing collation of a
node with children. (Previously, CaseExpr duplicated the standard logic,
and we would have needed a third copy for Aggref without this change.)
Andrew Gierth and David Fetter
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.
This restores a parse error that was thrown (though only in the ORDER BY
case) by the original collation patch. I had removed it in my recent
revisions because it was thrown at a place where collations now haven't
been computed yet; but I thought of another way to handle it.
Throwing the error at parse time, rather than leaving it to be done at
runtime, is good because a syntax error pointer is helpful for localizing
the problem. We can reasonably assume that the comparison function for a
collatable datatype will complain if it doesn't have a collation to use.
Now the planner might choose to implement GROUP or DISTINCT via hashing,
in which case no runtime error would actually occur, but it seems better
to throw error consistently rather than let the error depend on what the
planner chooses to do. Another possible objection is that the user might
specify a nondefault sort operator that doesn't care about collation
... but that's surely an uncommon usage, and it wouldn't hurt him to throw
in a COLLATE clause anyway. This change also makes the ORDER BY/GROUP
BY/DISTINCT case more consistent with the UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT case,
which was already coded to throw this error even though the same objections
could be raised there.
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.
