ce773f230d
The IEEE 754 standard allows a wide variety of bit patterns for NaNs,
of which at least two ("NaN" and "-NaN") are pretty easy to produce
from SQL on most machines. This is problematic because our btree
comparison functions deem all NaNs to be equal, but our float hash
functions know nothing about NaNs and will happily produce varying
hash codes for them. That causes unexpected results from queries
that hash a column containing different NaN values. It could also
produce unexpected lookup failures when using a hash index on a
float column, i.e. "WHERE x = 'NaN'" will not find all the rows
it should.
To fix, special-case NaN in the float hash functions, not too much
unlike the existing special case that forces zero and minus zero
to hash the same. I arranged for the most vanilla sort of NaN
(that coming from the C99 NAN constant) to still have the same
hash code as before, to reduce the risk to existing hash indexes.
I dithered about whether to back-patch this into stable branches,
but ultimately decided to do so. It's a clear improvement for
queries that hash internally. If there is anybody who has -NaN
in a hash index, they'd be well advised to re-index after applying
this patch ... but the misbehavior if they don't will not be much
worse than the misbehavior they had before.
Per bug #17172 from Ma Liangzhu.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17172-7505bea9e04e230f@postgresql.org
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