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Historically, the initial catalog data to be installed during bootstrap has been written in DATA() lines in the catalog header files. This had lots of disadvantages: the format was badly underdocumented, it was very difficult to edit the data in any mechanized way, and due to the lack of any abstraction the data was verbose, hard to read/understand, and easy to get wrong. Hence, move this data into separate ".dat" files and represent it in a way that can easily be read and rewritten by Perl scripts. The new format is essentially "key => value" for each column; while it's a bit repetitive, explicit labeling of each value makes the data far more readable and less error-prone. Provide a way to abbreviate entries by omitting field values that match a specified default value for their column. This allows removal of a large amount of repetitive boilerplate and also lowers the barrier to adding new columns. Also teach genbki.pl how to translate symbolic OID references into numeric OIDs for more cases than just "regproc"-like pg_proc references. It can now do that for regprocedure-like references (thus solving the problem that regproc is ambiguous for overloaded functions), operators, types, opfamilies, opclasses, and access methods. Use this to turn nearly all OID cross-references in the initial data into symbolic form. This represents a very large step forward in readability and error resistance of the initial catalog data. It should also reduce the difficulty of renumbering OID assignments in uncommitted patches. Also, solve the longstanding problem that frontend code that would like to use OID macros and other information from the catalog headers often had difficulty with backend-only code in the headers. To do this, arrange for all generated macros, plus such other declarations as we deem fit, to be placed in "derived" header files that are safe for frontend inclusion. (Once clients migrate to using these pg_*_d.h headers, it will be possible to get rid of the pg_*_fn.h headers, which only exist to quarantine code away from clients. That is left for follow-on patches, however.) The now-automatically-generated macros include the Anum_xxx and Natts_xxx constants that we used to have to update by hand when adding or removing catalog columns. Replace the former manual method of generating OID macros for pg_type entries with an automatic method, ensuring that all built-in types have OID macros. (But note that this patch does not change the way that OID macros for pg_proc entries are built and used. It's not clear that making that match the other catalogs would be worth extra code churn.) Add SGML documentation explaining what the new data format is and how to work with it. Despite being a very large change in the catalog headers, there is no catversion bump here, because postgres.bki and related output files haven't changed at all. John Naylor, based on ideas from various people; review and minor additional coding by me; previous review by Alvaro Herrera Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAJVSVGWO48JbbwXkJz_yBFyGYW-M9YWxnPdxJBUosDC9ou_F0Q@mail.gmail.com
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== 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. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here: https://www.postgresql.org/download See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at https://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at https://www.postgresql.org/.