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
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
Section 10.5 didn't say explicitly that multiple UNIONs are resolved
pairwise. Since the resolution algorithm is described as taking any
number of inputs, readers might well think that a query like
"select x union select y union select z" would be resolved by
considering x, y, and z in one resolution step. But that's not what
happens (and I think that behavior is per SQL spec). Add an example
clarifying this point.
Per bug #15129 from Philippe Beaudoin.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/152196085023.32649.9916472370480121694@wrigleys.postgresql.org
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
Previously, we left such literals alone if the query or subquery had
no properties forcing a type decision to be made (such as an ORDER BY or
DISTINCT clause using that output column). This meant that "unknown" could
be an exposed output column type, which has never been a great idea because
it could result in strange failures later on. For example, an outer query
that tried to do any operations on an unknown-type subquery output would
generally fail with some weird error like "failed to find conversion
function from unknown to text" or "could not determine which collation to
use for string comparison". Also, if the case occurred in a CREATE VIEW's
query then the view would have an unknown-type column, causing similar
failures in queries trying to use the view.
To fix, at the tail end of parse analysis of a query, forcibly convert any
remaining "unknown" literals in its SELECT or RETURNING list to type text.
However, provide a switch to suppress that, and use it in the cases of
SELECT inside a set operation or INSERT command. In those cases we already
had type resolution rules that make use of context information from outside
the subquery proper, and we don't want to change that behavior.
Also, change creation of an unknown-type column in a relation from a
warning to a hard error. The error should be unreachable now in CREATE
VIEW or CREATE MATVIEW, but it's still possible to explicitly say "unknown"
in CREATE TABLE or CREATE (composite) TYPE. We want to forbid that because
it's nothing but a foot-gun.
This change creates a pg_upgrade failure case: a matview that contains an
unknown-type column can't be pg_upgraded, because reparsing the matview's
defining query will now decide that the column is of type text, which
doesn't match the cstring-like storage that the old materialized column
would actually have. Add a checking pass to detect that. While at it,
we can detect tables or composite types that would fail, essentially
for free. Those would fail safely anyway later on, but we might as
well fail earlier.
This patch is by me, but it owes something to previous investigations
by Rahila Syed. Also thanks to Ashutosh Bapat and Michael Paquier for
review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2L28uwwbL9HUM-WR=hromW1Cvamkn7O-g8fPY2m=_7muJ0oA@mail.gmail.com
plpgsql's historical method for converting datatypes during assignments was
to apply the source type's output function and then the destination type's
input function. Aside from being miserably inefficient in most cases, this
method failed outright in many cases where a user might expect it to work;
an example is that "declare x int; ... x := 3.9;" would fail, not round the
value to 4.
Instead, let's convert by applying the appropriate assignment cast whenever
there is one. To avoid breaking compatibility unnecessarily, fall back to
the I/O conversion method if there is no assignment cast.
So far as I can tell, there is just one case where this method produces a
different result than the old code in a case where the old code would not
have thrown an error. That is assignment of a boolean value to a string
variable (type text, varchar, or bpchar); the old way gave boolean's output
representation, ie 't'/'f', while the new way follows the behavior of the
bool-to-text cast and so gives 'true' or 'false'. This will need to be
called out as an incompatibility in the 9.5 release notes.
Aside from handling many conversion cases more sanely, this method is
often significantly faster than the old way. In part that's because
of more effective caching of the conversion info.
The user documentation was vague and not entirely accurate about how
we treat domain inputs for ambiguous operators/functions. Clarify
that, and add an example and some commentary. Per a recent question
from Adam Mackler.
It's acted like this ever since we added domains, so back-patch
to all supported branches.
For a very long time, one of the parser's heuristics for resolving
ambiguous operator calls has been to assume that unknown-type literals are
of the same type as the other input (if it's known). However, this was
only used in the first step of quickly checking for an exact-types match,
and thus did not help in resolving matches that require coercion, such as
matches to polymorphic operators. As we add more polymorphic operators,
this becomes more of a problem. This patch adds another use of the same
heuristic as a last-ditch check before failing to resolve an ambiguous
operator or function call. In particular this will let us define the range
inclusion operator in a less limited way (to come in a follow-on patch).
This example wasn't updated when we changed the behavior of bpcharlen()
in 8.0, nor when we changed the number of parameters taken by the bpchar()
cast function in 7.3. Per report from lsliang.
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.
only type categories in which the previous coding made *every* type
preferred; so there is no change in effective behavior, because the function
resolution rules only do something different when faced with a choice
between preferred and non-preferred types in the same category. It just
seems safer and less surprising to have CREATE TYPE default to non-preferred
status ...
with system catalog lookups, as was foreseen to be necessary almost since
their creation. Instead put the information into two new pg_type columns,
typcategory and typispreferred. Add support for setting these when
creating a user-defined base type.
The category column is just a "char" (i.e. a poor man's enum), allowing
a crude form of user extensibility of the category list: just use an
otherwise-unused character. This seems sufficient for foreseen uses,
but we could upgrade to having an actual category catalog someday, if
there proves to be a huge demand for custom type categories.
In this patch I have attempted to hew exactly to the behavior of the
previous hardwired logic, except for introducing new type categories for
arrays, composites, and enums. In particular the default preferred state
for user-defined types remains TRUE. That seems worth revisiting, but it
should be done as a separate patch from introducing the infrastructure.
Likewise, any adjustment of the standard set of categories should be done
separately.
so long as all the trailing arguments are of the same (non-array) type.
The function receives them as a single array argument (which is why they
have to all be the same type).
It might be useful to extend this facility to aggregates, but this patch
doesn't do that.
This patch imposes a noticeable slowdown on function lookup --- a follow-on
patch will fix that by adding a redundant column to pg_proc.
Pavel Stehule
Document return type of cast functions.
Also change documentation to prefer the term "binary coercible" in its
present sense instead of the previous term "binary compatible".
to a UNION, CASE, or related construct are of the same domain type. The
main part of this routine smashes domains to their base types, which seems
necessary because the logic involves TypeCategory() and IsPreferredType(),
neither of which work usefully on domains. However, we can add a first
pass that just detects whether all the inputs are exactly the same type,
and if so accept that without question (so long as it's not UNKNOWN).
Per recent gripe from Dean Rasheed.
In passing, remove some tests for InvalidOid, which have clearly been dead
code for quite some time now, because getBaseType() would fail on that input.
Also, clarify the manual's not-very-precise description of the existing
algorithm's behavior.
from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions. These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.
The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible. This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.
This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation. Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
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".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
blanks, in hopes of reducing the surprise factor for newbies. Remove
redundant operators for VARCHAR (it depends wholly on TEXT operations now).
Clean up resolution of ambiguous operators/functions to avoid surprising
choices for domains: domains are treated as equivalent to their base types
and binary-coercibility is no longer considered a preference item when
choosing among multiple operators/functions. IsBinaryCoercible now correctly
reflects the notion that you need *only* relabel the type to get from type
A to type B: that is, a domain is binary-coercible to its base type, but
not vice versa. Various marginal cleanup, including merging the essentially
duplicate resolution code in parse_func.c and parse_oper.c. Improve opr_sanity
regression test to understand about binary compatibility (using pg_cast),
and fix a couple of small errors in the catalogs revealed thereby.
Restructure "special operator" handling to fetch operators via index opclasses
rather than hardwiring assumptions about names (cleans up the pattern_ops
stuff a little).
- more work from the SGML police
- some grammar improvements: rewriting a paragraph or two, replacing
contractions where (IMHO) appropriate
- fix missing utility commands in lock mode docs
- improve CLUSTER, REINDEX, SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION ref pages
Neil Conway
Tom Lane