This documentation never got the word about the existence of check-world or
installcheck-world. Revise to recommend use of those, and document all the
subsidiary test suites. Do some minor wordsmithing elsewhere, too.
In passing, remove markup related to generation of plain-text regression
test instructions, since we don't do that anymore.
Back-patch to 9.1 where check-world was added. (installcheck-world exists
in 9.0; but since check-world doesn't, this patch would need additional
work to cover that branch, and it doesn't seem worth the effort.)
The documentation suggested using "echo | psql", but not the often-superior
alternative of a here-document. Also, be more direct about suggesting
that people avoid -c for multiple commands. Per discussion.
Previously we were piggybacking on transaction ID parameters to freeze
multixacts; but since there isn't necessarily any relationship between
rates of Xid and multixact consumption, this turns out not to be a good
idea.
Therefore, we now have multixact-specific freezing parameters:
vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age: when to remove multis as we come across
them in vacuum (default to 5 million, i.e. early in comparison to Xid's
default of 50 million)
vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age: when to force whole-table scans
instead of scanning only the pages marked as not all visible in
visibility map (default to 150 million, same as for Xids). Whichever of
both which reaches the 150 million mark earlier will cause a whole-table
scan.
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age: when for cause emergency,
uninterruptible whole-table scans (default to 400 million, double as
that for Xids). This means there shouldn't be more frequent emergency
vacuuming than previously, unless multixacts are being used very
rapidly.
Backpatch to 9.3 where multixacts were made to persist enough to require
freezing. To avoid an ABI break in 9.3, VacuumStmt has a couple of
fields in an unnatural place, and StdRdOptions is split in two so that
the newly added fields can go at the end.
Patch by me, reviewed by Robert Haas, with additional input from Andres
Freund and Tom Lane.
We have a practice of providing a "bread crumb" trail between the minor
versions where the migration section actually tells you to do something.
Historically that was just plain text, eg, "see the release notes for
9.2.4"; but if you're using a browser or PDF reader, it's a lot nicer
if it's a live hyperlink. So use "<xref>" instead. Any argument against
doing this vanished with the recent decommissioning of plain-text release
notes.
Vik Fearing
Providing this information as plain text was doubtless worth the trouble
ten years ago, but it seems likely that hardly anyone reads it in this
format anymore. And the effort required to maintain these files (in the
form of extra-complex markup rules in the relevant parts of the SGML
documentation) is significant. So, let's stop doing that and rely solely
on the other documentation formats.
Per discussion, the plain-text INSTALL instructions might still be worth
their keep, so we continue to generate that file.
Rather than remove HISTORY and src/test/regress/README from distribution
tarballs entirely, replace them with simple stub files that tell the reader
where to find the relevant documentation. This is mainly to avoid possibly
breaking packaging recipes that expect these files to exist.
Back-patch to all supported branches, because simplifying the markup
requirements for release notes won't help much unless we do it in all
branches.
Primarily, explain where to find the system-wide psqlrc file, per recent
gripe from John Sutton. Do some general wordsmithing and improve the
markup, too.
Also adjust psqlrc.sample so its comments about file location are somewhat
trustworthy. (Not sure why we bother with this file when it's empty,
but whatever.)
Back-patch to 9.2 where the startup file naming scheme was last changed.
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.
SGML documentation, as well as code comments, failed to note that an FDW's
validator will be applied to foreign-table options for foreign tables using
the FDW.
Etsuro Fujita
The previous coding attempted to activate all the GUC settings specified
in SET clauses, so that the function validator could operate in the GUC
environment expected by the function body. However, this is problematic
when restoring a dump, since the SET clauses might refer to database
objects that don't exist yet. We already have the parameter
check_function_bodies that's meant to prevent forward references in
function definitions from breaking dumps, so let's change CREATE FUNCTION
to not install the SET values if check_function_bodies is off.
Authors of function validators were already advised not to make any
"context sensitive" checks when check_function_bodies is off, if indeed
they're checking anything at all in that mode. But extend the
documentation to point out the GUC issue in particular.
(Note that we still check the SET clauses to some extent; the behavior
with !check_function_bodies is now approximately equivalent to what ALTER
DATABASE/ROLE have been doing for awhile with context-dependent GUCs.)
This problem can be demonstrated in all active branches, so back-patch
all the way.
It seems like a good idea to update these examples since some fairly
basic planner behaviors have changed in 9.3; notably that the startup cost
for an indexscan plan node is no longer invariably estimated at 0.00.