c7aba7c14e
This patch generalizes the subscripting infrastructure so that any data type can be subscripted, if it provides a handler function to define what that means. Traditional variable-length (varlena) arrays all use array_subscript_handler(), while the existing fixed-length types that support subscripting use raw_array_subscript_handler(). It's expected that other types that want to use subscripting notation will define their own handlers. (This patch provides no such new features, though; it only lays the foundation for them.) To do this, move the parser's semantic processing of subscripts (including coercion to whatever data type is required) into a method callback supplied by the handler. On the execution side, replace the ExecEvalSubscriptingRef* layer of functions with direct calls to callback-supplied execution routines. (Thus, essentially no new run-time overhead should be caused by this patch. Indeed, there is room to remove some overhead by supplying specialized execution routines. This patch does a little bit in that line, but more could be done.) Additional work is required here and there to remove formerly hard-wired assumptions about the result type, collation, etc of a SubscriptingRef expression node; and to remove assumptions that the subscript values must be integers. One useful side-effect of this is that we now have a less squishy mechanism for identifying whether a data type is a "true" array: instead of wiring in weird rules about typlen, we can look to see if pg_type.typsubscript == F_ARRAY_SUBSCRIPT_HANDLER. For this to be bulletproof, we have to forbid user-defined types from using that handler directly; but there seems no good reason for them to do so. This patch also removes assumptions that the number of subscripts is limited to MAXDIM (6), or indeed has any hard-wired limit. That limit still applies to types handled by array_subscript_handler or raw_array_subscript_handler, but to discourage other dependencies on this constant, I've moved it from c.h to utils/array.h. Dmitry Dolgov, reviewed at various times by Tom Lane, Arthur Zakirov, Peter Eisentraut, Pavel Stehule Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+q6zcVDuGBv=M0FqBYX8DPebS3F_0KQ6OVFobGJPM507_SZ_w@mail.gmail.com Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+q6zcVovR+XY4mfk-7oNk-rF91gH0PebnNfuUjuuDsyHjOcVA@mail.gmail.com
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.