This feature has been a thorn in our sides for a long time, causing
many grammatical ambiguity problems. It doesn't seem worth the
pain to continue to support it, so remove it.
There are some follow-on improvements we can make in the grammar,
but this commit only removes the bare minimum number of productions,
plus assorted backend support code.
Note that pg_dump and psql continue to have full support, since
they may be used against older servers. However, pg_dump warns
about postfix operators. There is also a check in pg_upgrade.
Documentation-wise, I (tgl) largely removed the "left unary"
terminology in favor of saying "prefix operator", which is
a more standard and IMO less confusing term.
I included a catversion bump, although no initial catalog data
changes here, to mark the boundary at which oprkind = 'r'
stopped being valid in pg_operator.
Mark Dilger, based on work by myself and Robert Haas;
review by John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/38ca86db-42ab-9b48-2902-337a0d6b8311@2ndquadrant.com
Per discussion, we're planning to remove parser support for postfix
operators in order to simplify the grammar. So it behooves us to
put out a deprecation notice at least one release before that.
There is only one built-in postfix operator, ! for factorial.
Label it deprecated in the docs and in pg_description, and adjust
some examples that formerly relied on it. (The sister prefix
operator !! is also deprecated. We don't really have to remove
that one, but since we're suggesting that people use factorial()
instead, it seems better to remove both operators.)
Also state in the CREATE OPERATOR ref page that postfix operators
in general are going away.
Although this changes the initial contents of pg_description,
I did not force a catversion bump; it doesn't seem essential.
In v13, also back-patch 4c5cf5431, so that there's someplace for
the <link>s to point to.
Mark Dilger and John Naylor, with some adjustments by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/BE2DF53D-251A-4E26-972F-930E523580E9@enterprisedb.com
In one or two places it seemed reasonable to modify the example so as
to shorten its output slightly; but for the most part I just added a
&zwsp; after 67 characters, which is the most we can fit on a line
of monospace text in A4 format.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/6916.1589146280@sss.pgh.pa.us
I concluded that we really just ought to force all tables in PDF output
to default to "left" alignment (instead of "justify"); that is what the
HTML toolchain does and that's what most people have been designing the
tables to look good with. There are few if any places where "justify"
produces better-looking output, and there are many where it looks
horrible. So change stylesheet-fo.xsl to make that true.
Also tweak column widths in a few more tables to make them look better
and avoid "exceed the available area" warnings. This commit fixes
basically everything that can be fixed through that approach. The
remaining tables that give warnings either are scheduled for redesign
as per recent discussions, or need a fundamental rethink because they
Just Don't Work in a narrow view.
SQL includes provisions for numeric Unicode escapes in string
literals and identifiers. Previously we only accepted those
if they represented ASCII characters or the server encoding
was UTF-8, making the conversion to internal form trivial.
This patch adjusts things so that we'll call the appropriate
encoding conversion function in less-trivial cases, allowing
the escape sequence to be accepted so long as it corresponds
to some character available in the server encoding.
This also applies to processing of Unicode escapes in JSONB.
However, the old restriction still applies to client-side
JSON processing, since that hasn't got access to the server's
encoding conversion infrastructure.
This patch includes some lexer infrastructure that simplifies
throwing errors with error cursors pointing into the middle of
a string (or other complex token). For the moment I only used
it for errors relating to Unicode escapes, but we might later
expand the usage to some other cases.
Patch by me, reviewed by John Naylor.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2393.1578958316@sss.pgh.pa.us
Commit 5770172cb0 documented secure schema
usage, and that advice suffices for using unqualified names securely.
Document, in typeconv-func primarily, the additional issues that arise
with qualified names. Back-patch to 9.3 (all supported versions).
Reviewed by Jonathan S. Katz.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180721012446.GA1840594@rfd.leadboat.com
Commit ff4f88916 adjusted the code to enforce the SQL spec's requirement
that a window using GROUPS mode must have an ORDER BY clause. But I missed
that the documentation explicitly said you didn't have to have one.
Also minor wordsmithing in the window-function section of select.sgml.
Per Masahiko Sawada, though I didn't use his patch.
This patch adds the ability to use "RANGE offset PRECEDING/FOLLOWING"
frame boundaries in window functions. We'd punted on that back in the
original patch to add window functions, because it was not clear how to
do it in a reasonably data-type-extensible fashion. That problem is
resolved here by adding the ability for btree operator classes to provide
an "in_range" support function that defines how to add or subtract the
RANGE offset value. Factoring it this way also allows the operator class
to avoid overflow problems near the ends of the datatype's range, if it
wishes to expend effort on that. (In the committed patch, the integer
opclasses handle that issue, but it did not seem worth the trouble to
avoid overflow failures for datetime types.)
The patch includes in_range support for the integer_ops opfamily
(int2/int4/int8) as well as the standard datetime types. Support for
other numeric types has been requested, but that seems like suitable
material for a follow-on patch.
In addition, the patch adds GROUPS mode which counts the offset in
ORDER-BY peer groups rather than rows, and it adds the frame_exclusion
options specified by SQL:2011. As far as I can see, we are now fully
up to spec on window framing options.
Existing behaviors remain unchanged, except that I changed the errcode
for a couple of existing error reports to meet the SQL spec's expectation
that negative "offset" values should be reported as SQLSTATE 22013.
Internally and in relevant parts of the documentation, we now consistently
use the terminology "offset PRECEDING/FOLLOWING" rather than "value
PRECEDING/FOLLOWING", since the term "value" is confusingly vague.
Oliver Ford, reviewed and whacked around some by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAGMVOdu9sivPAxbNN0X+q19Sfv9edEPv=HibOJhB14TJv_RCQg@mail.gmail.com
Since some preparation work had already been done, the only source
changes left were changing empty-element tags like <xref linkend="foo">
to <xref linkend="foo"/>, and changing the DOCTYPE.
The source files are still named *.sgml, but they are actually XML files
now. Renaming could be considered later.
In the build system, the intermediate step to convert from SGML to XML
is removed. Everything is build straight from the source files again.
The OpenSP (or the old SP) package is no longer needed.
The documentation toolchain instructions are updated and are much
simpler now.
Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
For DocBook XML compatibility, don't use SGML empty tags (</>) anymore,
replace by the full tag name. Add a warning option to catch future
occurrences.
Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
This is not required in SGML, but will be in XML, so this is a step to
prepare for the conversion to XML. (It is still not required to escape
>, but we did it here in some cases for symmetry.)
Add a command-line option to osx/onsgmls calls to warn about unescaped
occurrences in the future.
Author: Alexander Law <exclusion@gmail.com>
Author: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>
Specifically, the behavior of general-purpose and statistical aggregates
as window functions was not clearly documented, and terms were
inconsistently used. Also add docs about the difference between
cume_dist and percent_rank, rather than just the formulas.
Discussion: 20170406214918.GA5757@momjian.us
This causes a warning with the old html-docs toolchain, though not with the
new. I had originally supposed that we needed both <indexterm> entries to
get both a primary index entry and a see-also link; but evidently not,
as pointed out by Fabien Coelho.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.20.1702161616060.5445@lancre
We had an index entry for "median" attached to the percentile_cont function
entry, which was pretty useless because a person following the link would
never realize that that function was the one they were being hinted to use.
Instead, make the index entry point at the example in syntax-aggregates,
and add a <seealso> link to "percentile".
Also, since that example explicitly claims to be calculating the median,
make it use percentile_cont not percentile_disc. This makes no difference
in terms of the larger goals of that section, but so far as I can find,
nearly everyone thinks that "median" means the continuous not discrete
calculation.
Per gripe from Steven Winfield. Back-patch to 9.4 where we introduced
percentile_cont.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161223102056.25614.1166@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Create a section specifically for the syntactic rules around whole-row
variable usage, such as expansion of "foo.*". This was previously
documented only haphazardly, with some critical info buried in
unexpected places like xfunc-sql-composite-functions. Per repeated
questions in different mailing lists.
Discussion: <16288.1479610770@sss.pgh.pa.us>
The allowed syntax for OVERLAPS, viz "row OVERLAPS row", is sufficiently
constrained that we don't actually need a precedence declaration for
OVERLAPS; indeed removing this declaration does not change the generated
gram.c file at all. Let's remove it to avoid confusion about whether
OVERLAPS has precedence or not. If we ever generalize what we allow for
OVERLAPS, we might need to put back a precedence declaration for it,
but we might want some other level than what it has today --- and leaving
the declaration there would just risk confusion about whether that would
be an incompatible change.
Likewise, remove OVERLAPS from the documentation's precedence table.
Per discussion with Noah Misch. Back-patch to 9.5 where we hacked up some
nearby precedence decisions.
You're required to write either RANGE or ROWS to start a frame clause,
but the documentation incorrectly implied this is optional. Noted by
David Johnston.
While the SQL standard is pretty vague on the overall topic of operator
precedence (because it never presents a unified BNF for all expressions),
it does seem reasonable to conclude from the spec for <boolean value
expression> that OR has the lowest precedence, then AND, then NOT, then IS
tests, then the six standard comparison operators, then everything else
(since any non-boolean operator in a WHERE clause would need to be an
argument of one of these).
We were only sort of on board with that: most notably, while "<" ">" and
"=" had properly low precedence, "<=" ">=" and "<>" were treated as generic
operators and so had significantly higher precedence. And "IS" tests were
even higher precedence than those, which is very clearly wrong per spec.
Another problem was that "foo NOT SOMETHING bar" constructs, such as
"x NOT LIKE y", were treated inconsistently because of a bison
implementation artifact: they had the documented precedence with respect
to operators to their right, but behaved like NOT (i.e., very low priority)
with respect to operators to their left.
Fixing the precedence issues is just a small matter of rearranging the
precedence declarations in gram.y, except for the NOT problem, which
requires adding an additional lookahead case in base_yylex() so that we
can attach a different token precedence to NOT LIKE and allied two-word
operators.
The bulk of this patch is not the bug fix per se, but adding logic to
parse_expr.c to allow giving warnings if an expression has changed meaning
because of these precedence changes. These warnings are off by default
and are enabled by the new GUC operator_precedence_warning. It's believed
that very few applications will be affected by these changes, but it was
agreed that a warning mechanism is essential to help debug any that are.
SQL has standardized on => as the use of to specify named parameters,
and we've wanted for many years to support the same syntax ourselves,
but this has been complicated by the possible use of => as an operator
name. In PostgreSQL 9.0, we began emitting a warning when an operator
named => was defined, and in PostgreSQL 9.2, we stopped shipping a
=>(text, text) operator as part of hstore. By the time the next major
version of PostgreSQL is released, => will have been deprecated for a
full five years, so hopefully there won't be too many people still
relying on it. We continue to support := for compatibility with
previous PostgreSQL releases.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed by Petr Jelinek, with a few documentation
tweaks by me.
The possibility that constant subexpressions of a CASE might be evaluated
at planning time was touched on in 9.17.1 (CASE expressions), but it really
ought to be explained in 4.2.14 (Expression Evaluation Rules) which is the
primary discussion of such topics. Add text and an example there, and
revise the <note> under CASE to link there.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since it's acted like this for a
long time (though 9.2+ is probably worse because of its more aggressive
use of constant-folding via replanning of nominally-prepared statements).
Pre-9.4, also back-patch text added in commit 0ce627d4 about CASE versus
aggregate functions.
Tom Lane and David Johnston, per discussion of bug #12273.
These cases formerly failed with errors about "could not find array type
for data type". Now they yield arrays of the same element type and one
higher dimension.
The implementation involves creating functions with API similar to the
existing accumArrayResult() family. I (tgl) also extended the base family
by adding an initArrayResult() function, which allows callers to avoid
special-casing the zero-inputs case if they just want an empty array as
result. (Not all do, so the previous calling convention remains valid.)
This allowed simplifying some existing code in xml.c and plperl.c.
Ali Akbar, reviewed by Pavel Stehule, significantly modified by me
The SELECT reference page didn't really address the question of when
aggregate function evaluation occurs, nor did the "expression evaluation
rules" documentation mention that CASE can't be used to control whether
an aggregate gets evaluated or not. Improve that.
Per discussion of bug #11661. Original text by Marti Raudsepp and Michael
Paquier, rewritten significantly by me.
This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set
aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in
SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(),
percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the
spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that
can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data.
Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting
process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the
support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API
function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of
the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the
immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to
install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that
infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up.
In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic
aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER
additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by
allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT.
It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types
but not these.
Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing,
and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
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.
There's no inherent reason why an aggregate function can't be variadic
(even VARIADIC ANY) if its transition function can handle the case.
Indeed, this patch to add the feature touches none of the planner or
executor, and little of the parser; the main missing stuff was DDL and
pg_dump support.
It is true that variadic aggregates can create the same sort of ambiguity
about parameters versus ORDER BY keys that was complained of when we
(briefly) had both one- and two-argument forms of string_agg(). However,
the policy formed in response to that discussion only said that we'd not
create any built-in aggregates with varying numbers of arguments, not that
we shouldn't allow users to do it. So the logical extension of that is
we can allow users to make variadic aggregates as long as we're wary about
shipping any such in core.
In passing, this patch allows aggregate function arguments to be named, to
the extent of remembering the names in pg_proc and dumping them in pg_dump.
You can't yet call an aggregate using named-parameter notation. That seems
like a likely future extension, but it'll take some work, and it's not what
this patch is really about. Likewise, there's still some work needed to
make window functions handle VARIADIC fully, but I left that for another
day.
initdb forced because of new aggvariadic field in Aggref parse nodes.
This is SQL-standard with a few extensions, namely support for
subqueries and outer references in clause expressions.
catversion bump due to change in Aggref and WindowFunc.
David Fetter, reviewed by Dean Rasheed.
This is so that these sections will have stable HTML tags that one can
link to, rather than things like "AEN1902". Perhaps we should mount a
campaign to do this everywhere, but I've found myself pointing at
syntax.sgml subsections often enough to be sure it's useful here.
We'll now use "exists" for EXISTS(SELECT ...), "array" for ARRAY(SELECT
...), or the sub-select's own result column name for a simple expression
sub-select. Previously, you usually got "?column?" in such cases.
Marti Raudsepp, reviewed by Kyotaro Horiugchi
Per gripe from Grzegorz Szpetkowski.
Also, change the subsection heading from "Lexical Precedence" (which is
a contradiction in terms) to "Operator Precedence".
As noted by Thom Brown, this confuses the DocBook index processor; it
fails to merge entries that differ only in whitespace, and sorts them
unexpectedly as well. Seems like a toolchain bug, but I'm not going to
hold my breath waiting for a fix.
Note: easiest way to find these is to look for double spaces in HTML.index.
This adds collation support for columns and domains, a COLLATE clause
to override it per expression, and B-tree index support.
Peter Eisentraut
reviewed by Pavel Stehule, Itagaki Takahiro, Robert Haas, Noah Misch
Tom Lane