This allows the RETURNING list of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE/MERGE queries
to explicitly return old and new values by using the special aliases
"old" and "new", which are automatically added to the query (if not
already defined) while parsing its RETURNING list, allowing things
like:
RETURNING old.colname, new.colname, ...
RETURNING old.*, new.*
Additionally, a new syntax is supported, allowing the names "old" and
"new" to be changed to user-supplied alias names, e.g.:
RETURNING WITH (OLD AS o, NEW AS n) o.colname, n.colname, ...
This is useful when the names "old" and "new" are already defined,
such as inside trigger functions, allowing backwards compatibility to
be maintained -- the interpretation of any existing queries that
happen to already refer to relations called "old" or "new", or use
those as aliases for other relations, is not changed.
For an INSERT, old values will generally be NULL, and for a DELETE,
new values will generally be NULL, but that may change for an INSERT
with an ON CONFLICT ... DO UPDATE clause, or if a query rewrite rule
changes the command type. Therefore, we put no restrictions on the use
of old and new in any DML queries.
Dean Rasheed, reviewed by Jian He and Jeff Davis.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEZATCWx0J0-v=Qjc6gXzR=KtsdvAE7Ow=D=mu50AgOe+pvisQ@mail.gmail.com
This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.
PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings.
Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT.