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
now. Here some tested features, (examples included in the patch):
1.1) Subselects in the having clause 1.2) Double nested subselects
1.3) Subselects used in the where clause and in the having clause
simultaneously 1.4) Union Selects using having 1.5) Indexes
on the base relations are used correctly 1.6) Unallowed Queries
are prevented (e.g. qualifications in the
having clause that belong to the where clause) 1.7) Insert
into as select
2) Queries using the having clause on view relations also work
but there are some restrictions:
2.1) Create View as Select ... Having ...; using base tables in
the select 2.1.1) The Query rewrite system:
2.1.2) Why are only simple queries allowed against a view from 2.1)
? 2.2) Select ... from testview1, testview2, ... having...; 3) Bug
in ExecMergeJoin ??
Regards Stefan
sequential scans! (I think it will also work with hash, index, etc
but I did not check it out! I made some High level changes which
should work for all access methods, but maybe I'm wrong. Please
let me know.)
Now it is possible to make queries like:
select s.sname, max(p.pid), min(p.pid) from part p, supplier s
where s.sid=p.sid group by s.sname having max(pid)=6 and min(pid)=1
or avg(pid)=4;
Having does not work yet for queries that contain a subselect
statement in the Having clause, I'll try to fix this in the next
days.
If there are some bugs, please let me know, I'll start to read the
mailinglists now!
Now here is the patch against the original 6.3 version (no snapshot!!):
Stefan
of some global variables to support subselects and calls union_planner().
Calls to SS_replace_correlation_vars() and SS_process_sublinks() in
query_planner() before planning.
Get rid of #ifdef INDEXSCAN_PATCH in createplan.c.
Pass List* of Aggregs into executor, and create needed array there.
No longer need to double-processs Aggregs with second copy in Query.
Fix crash when doing:
select sum(x+1) from test where 1 > 0;
