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<TITLE>The POSTGRES95 User Manual - THE QUERY LANGUAGE</TITLE>
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<H1>9. EXTENDING SQL: OPERATORS</H1>
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POSTGRES supports left unary, right unary and binary
operators. Operators can be overloaded, or re-used
with different numbers and types of arguments. If
there is an ambiguous situation and the system cannot
determine the correct operator to use, it will return
an error and you may have to typecast the left and/or
right operands to help it understand which operator you
meant to use.
To create an operator for adding two complex numbers
can be done as follows. First we need to create a
function to add the new types. Then, we can create the
operator with the function.
<pre>
CREATE FUNCTION complex_add(complex, complex)
RETURNS complex
AS '$PWD/obj/complex.so'
LANGUAGE 'c';
CREATE OPERATOR + (
leftarg = complex,
rightarg = complex,
procedure = complex_add,
commutator = +
);
</pre>
We've shown how to create a binary operator here. To
create unary operators, just omit one of leftarg (for
left unary) or rightarg (for right unary).
If we give the system enough type information, it can
automatically figure out which operators to use.
<pre>
SELECT (a + b) AS c FROM test_complex;
+----------------+
|c |
+----------------+
|(5.2,6.05) |
+----------------+
|(133.42,144.95) |
+----------------+
</pre>
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