There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup. The problem is
in a situation like
<para>
<command>FOO</command> is ...
there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO". In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.
So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like
<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>
So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace. I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
I also rearranged the order of the sections to match the logical order
of processing steps: the distinct-elimination implied by SELECT DISTINCT
happens before, not after, any UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT combination.
Per a suggestion from Hitoshi Harada.
other columns to be referenced without listing them in GROUP BY, so long as
the primary key column(s) are listed in GROUP BY.
Eventually we should also allow functional dependency on a UNIQUE constraint
when the columns are marked NOT NULL, but that has to wait until NOT NULL
constraints are represented in pg_constraint, because we need to have
pg_constraint OIDs for all the conditions needed to ensure functional
dependency.
Peter Eisentraut, reviewed by Alex Hunsaker and Tom Lane
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
underneath the Limit node, not atop it. This fixes the old problem that such
a query might unexpectedly return fewer rows than the LIMIT says, due to
LockRows discarding updated rows.
There is a related problem that LockRows might destroy the sort ordering
produced by earlier steps; but fixing that by pushing LockRows below Sort
would create serious performance problems that are unjustified in many
real-world applications, as well as potential deadlock problems from locking
many more rows than expected. Instead, keep the present semantics of applying
FOR UPDATE after ORDER BY within a single query level; but allow the user to
specify the other way by writing FOR UPDATE in a sub-select. To make that
work, track whether FOR UPDATE appeared explicitly in sub-selects or got
pushed down from the parent, and don't flatten a sub-select that contained an
explicit FOR UPDATE.
for example in
WITH w AS (SELECT * FROM foo) SELECT * FROM w, bar ... FOR UPDATE
the FOR UPDATE will now affect bar but not foo. This is more useful and
consistent than the original 8.4 behavior, which tried to propagate FOR UPDATE
into the WITH query but always failed due to assorted implementation
restrictions. Even though we are in process of removing those restrictions,
it seems correct on philosophical grounds to not let the outer query's
FOR UPDATE affect the WITH query.
In passing, fix isLockedRel which frequently got things wrong in
nested-subquery cases: "FOR UPDATE OF foo" applies to an alias foo in the
current query level, not subqueries. This has been broken for a long time,
but it doesn't seem worth back-patching further than 8.4 because the actual
consequences are minimal. At worst the parser would sometimes get
RowShareLock on a relation when it should be AccessShareLock or vice versa.
That would only make a difference if someone were using ExclusiveLock
concurrently, which no standard operation does, and anyway FOR UPDATE
doesn't result in visible changes so it's not clear that the someone would
notice any problem. Between that and the fact that FOR UPDATE barely works
with subqueries at all in existing releases, I'm not excited about worrying
about it.
Per recent discussion, add_missing_from has been deprecated for long enough to
consider removing, and it's getting in the way of planned parser refactoring.
The system now always behaves as though add_missing_from were OFF.
Instead of requiring translators to translate the entire SQL command
synopses, change create_help.pl to only require them to translate the
placeholders, and paste those into the synopsis using a printf mechanism.
Make some small updates to the markup to make it easier to parse.
Note: This causes msgmerge of gettext 0.17 to segfault. You will need
the patch from https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27474 to make it work.
msgmerge usually only runs on babel.postgresql.org, however.
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.
about it doesn't simplify the grammar at all, and it does invite confusion
among those who only read the SELECT syntax summary and not the full details.
Per gripe from Jaime Casanova.
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.
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.
implementation uses an in-memory hash table, so it will poop out for very
large recursive results ... but the performance characteristics of a
sort-based implementation would be pretty unpleasant too.
There are some unimplemented aspects: recursive queries must use UNION ALL
(should allow UNION too), and we don't have SEARCH or CYCLE clauses.
These might or might not get done for 8.4, but even without them it's a
pretty useful feature.
There are also a couple of small loose ends and definitional quibbles,
which I'll send a memo about to pgsql-hackers shortly. But let's land
the patch now so we can get on with other development.
Yoshiyuki Asaba, with lots of help from Tatsuo Ishii and Tom Lane
ctype are now more like encoding, stored in new datcollate and datctype
columns in pg_database.
This is a stripped-down version of Radek Strnad's patch, with further
changes by me.
(or RETURNING), but only when the output name is not any SQL keyword.
This seems as close as we can get to the standard's syntax without a
great deal of thrashing. Original patch by Hiroshi Saito, amended by me.
parentheses in syntax descriptions. Consistently use the present tense
when describing the basic purpose of each "DROP" command. Add a few
more hyperlinks.
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".
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.
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...
support both FOR UPDATE and FOR SHARE in one command, as well as both
NOWAIT and normal WAIT behavior. The more general code is actually
simpler and cleaner.
