qualified operator names directly, for example CREATE OPERATOR myschema.+
( ... ). To qualify an operator name in an expression you need to write
OPERATOR(myschema.+) (thanks to Peter for suggesting an escape hatch).
I also took advantage of having to reformat pg_operator to fix something
that'd been bugging me for a while: mergejoinable operators should have
explicit links to the associated cross-data-type comparison operators,
rather than hardwiring an assumption that they are named < and >.
1. If there is exactly one pg_operator entry of the right name and oprkind,
oper() and related routines would return that entry whether its input type
had anything to do with the request or not. This is just premature
optimization: we shouldn't return the single candidate until after we verify
that it really is a valid candidate, ie, is at least coercion-compatible
with the given types.
2. oper() and related routines only promise a coercion-compatible result.
Unfortunately, there were quite a few callers that assumed the returned
operator is binary-compatible with the given datatype; they would proceed
to call it without making any datatype coercions. These callers include
sorting, grouping, aggregation, and VACUUM ANALYZE. In general I think
it is appropriate for these callers to require an exact or binary-compatible
match, so I've added a new routine compatible_oper() that only succeeds if
it can find an operator that doesn't require any run-time conversions.
Callers now call oper() or compatible_oper() depending on whether they are
prepared to deal with type conversion or not.
The upshot of these bugs is revealed by the following silliness in PL/Tcl's
selftest: it creates an operator @< on int4, and then tries to use it to
sort a char(N) column. The system would let it do that :-( (and evidently
has done so since 6.3 :-( :-(). The result in this case was just a silly
sort order, but the reverse combination would've provoked coredump from
trying to dereference integers. With this fix you get more reasonable
behavior:
pltcl_test=# select * from T_pkey1 order by key1, key2 using @<;
ERROR: Unable to identify an operator '@<' for types 'bpchar' and 'bpchar'
You will have to retype this query using an explicit cast
maintained for each cache entry. A cache entry will not be freed until
the matching ReleaseSysCache call has been executed. This eliminates
worries about cache entries getting dropped while still in use. See
my posting to pg-hackers of even date for more info.
match then it tried for a self-commutative operator with the reversed input
data types. This is pretty silly; there could never be such an operator,
except maybe in binary-compatible-type scenarios, and we have oper_inexact
for that. Besides which, the oprsanity regress test would complain about
such an operator. Remove nonfunctional code and simplify routine calling
convention accordingly.
Bruce Momjian