From 5e45211a64149b3c659b90ff2de6fa982a5a93ed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Daniel Baumann Date: Sat, 4 May 2024 14:17:33 +0200 Subject: Adding upstream version 15.5. Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann --- doc/src/sgml/features.sgml | 494 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 494 insertions(+) create mode 100644 doc/src/sgml/features.sgml (limited to 'doc/src/sgml/features.sgml') diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/features.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/features.sgml new file mode 100644 index 0000000..05365d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/src/sgml/features.sgml @@ -0,0 +1,494 @@ + + + + SQL Conformance + + + This section attempts to outline to what extent + PostgreSQL conforms to the current SQL + standard. The following information is not a full statement of + conformance, but it presents the main topics in as much detail as is + both reasonable and useful for users. + + + + The formal name of the SQL standard is ISO/IEC 9075 Database + Language SQL. A revised version of the standard is released + from time to time; the most recent update appearing in 2016. + The 2016 version is referred to as ISO/IEC 9075:2016, or simply as SQL:2016. + The versions prior to that were SQL:2011, SQL:2008, SQL:2006, SQL:2003, + SQL:1999, and SQL-92. Each version + replaces the previous one, so claims of conformance to earlier + versions have no official merit. + PostgreSQL development aims for + conformance with the latest official version of the standard where + such conformance does not contradict traditional features or common + sense. Many of the features required by the SQL + standard are supported, though sometimes with slightly differing + syntax or function. Further moves towards conformance can be + expected over time. + + + + SQL-92 defined three feature sets for + conformance: Entry, Intermediate, and Full. Most database + management systems claiming SQL standard + conformance were conforming at only the Entry level, since the + entire set of features in the Intermediate and Full levels was + either too voluminous or in conflict with legacy behaviors. + + + + Starting with SQL:1999, the SQL standard defines + a large set of individual features rather than the ineffectively + broad three levels found in SQL-92. A large + subset of these features represents the Core + features, which every conforming SQL implementation must supply. + The rest of the features are purely optional. + + + + The standard versions beginning with SQL:2003 + are also split into a number + of parts. Each is known by a shorthand name. Note that these parts + are not consecutively numbered. + + + ISO/IEC 9075-1 Framework (SQL/Framework)SQL/Framework + ISO/IEC 9075-2 Foundation (SQL/Foundation)SQL/Foundation + ISO/IEC 9075-3 Call Level Interface (SQL/CLI)SQL/CLI + ISO/IEC 9075-4 Persistent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM)SQL/PSM + ISO/IEC 9075-9 Management of External Data (SQL/MED)SQL/MED + ISO/IEC 9075-10 Object Language Bindings (SQL/OLB)SQL/OLB + ISO/IEC 9075-11 Information and Definition Schemas (SQL/Schemata)SQL/Schemata + ISO/IEC 9075-13 Routines and Types using the Java Language (SQL/JRT)SQL/JRT + ISO/IEC 9075-14 XML-related specifications (SQL/XML)SQL/XML + ISO/IEC 9075-15 Multi-dimensional arrays (SQL/MDA)SQL/MDA + + + + + The PostgreSQL core covers parts 1, 2, 9, + 11, and 14. Part 3 is covered by the ODBC driver, and part 13 is + covered by the PL/Java plug-in, but exact conformance is currently + not being verified for these components. There are currently no + implementations of parts 4, 10, and 15 + for PostgreSQL. + + + + PostgreSQL supports most of the major features of SQL:2016. Out of + 177 mandatory features required for full Core conformance, + PostgreSQL conforms to at least 170. In addition, there is a long + list of supported optional features. It might be worth noting that at + the time of writing, no current version of any database management + system claims full conformance to Core SQL:2016. + + + + In the following two sections, we provide a list of those features + that PostgreSQL supports, followed by a + list of the features defined in SQL:2016 which + are not yet supported in PostgreSQL. + Both of these lists are approximate: There might be minor details that + are nonconforming for a feature that is listed as supported, and + large parts of an unsupported feature might in fact be implemented. + The main body of the documentation always contains the most accurate + information about what does and does not work. + + + + + Feature codes containing a hyphen are subfeatures. Therefore, if a + particular subfeature is not supported, the main feature is listed + as unsupported even if some other subfeatures are supported. + + + + + Supported Features + + + + + + + + + + + Identifier + Core? + Description + Comment + + + + &features-supported; + + + + + + + + Unsupported Features + + + The following features defined in SQL:2016 are not + implemented in this release of + PostgreSQL. In a few cases, equivalent + functionality is available. + + + + + + + + + + Identifier + Core? + Description + Comment + + + + &features-unsupported; + + + + + + + + XML Limits and Conformance to SQL/XML + + + SQL/XML + limits and conformance + + + + Significant revisions to the XML-related specifications in ISO/IEC 9075-14 + (SQL/XML) were introduced with SQL:2006. + PostgreSQL's implementation of the XML data + type and related functions largely follows the earlier 2003 edition, + with some borrowing from later editions. In particular: + + + + Where the current standard provides a family of XML data types + to hold document or content in + untyped or XML Schema-typed variants, and a type + XML(SEQUENCE) to hold arbitrary pieces of XML content, + PostgreSQL provides the single + xml type, which can hold document or + content. There is no equivalent of the + standard's sequence type. + + + + + + PostgreSQL provides two functions + introduced in SQL:2006, but in variants that use the XPath 1.0 + language, rather than XML Query as specified for them in the + standard. + + + + + + + This section presents some of the resulting differences you may encounter. + + + + Queries Are Restricted to XPath 1.0 + + + The PostgreSQL-specific functions + xpath() and xpath_exists() + query XML documents using the XPath language. + PostgreSQL also provides XPath-only variants + of the standard functions XMLEXISTS and + XMLTABLE, which officially use + the XQuery language. For all of these functions, + PostgreSQL relies on the + libxml2 library, which provides only XPath 1.0. + + + + There is a strong connection between the XQuery language and XPath + versions 2.0 and later: any expression that is syntactically valid and + executes successfully in both produces the same result (with a minor + exception for expressions containing numeric character references or + predefined entity references, which XQuery replaces with the + corresponding character while XPath leaves them alone). But there is + no such connection between these languages and XPath 1.0; it was an + earlier language and differs in many respects. + + + + There are two categories of limitation to keep in mind: the restriction + from XQuery to XPath for the functions specified in the SQL standard, and + the restriction of XPath to version 1.0 for both the standard and the + PostgreSQL-specific functions. + + + + Restriction of XQuery to XPath + + + Features of XQuery beyond those of XPath include: + + + + + XQuery expressions can construct and return new XML nodes, in + addition to all possible XPath values. XPath can create and return + values of the atomic types (numbers, strings, and so on) but can + only return XML nodes that were already present in documents + supplied as input to the expression. + + + + + + XQuery has control constructs for iteration, sorting, and grouping. + + + + + + XQuery allows declaration and use of local functions. + + + + + + + Recent XPath versions begin to offer capabilities overlapping with + these (such as functional-style for-each and + sort, anonymous functions, and + parse-xml to create a node from a string), + but such features were not available before XPath 3.0. + + + + + Restriction of XPath to 1.0 + + + For developers familiar with XQuery and XPath 2.0 or later, XPath 1.0 + presents a number of differences to contend with: + + + + + The fundamental type of an XQuery/XPath expression, the + sequence, which can contain XML nodes, atomic values, + or both, does not exist in XPath 1.0. A 1.0 expression can only + produce a node-set (containing zero or more XML nodes), or a single + atomic value. + + + + + + Unlike an XQuery/XPath sequence, which can contain any desired + items in any desired order, an XPath 1.0 node-set has no + guaranteed order and, like any set, does not allow multiple + appearances of the same item. + + + The libxml2 library does seem to + always return node-sets to PostgreSQL + with their members in the same relative order they had in the + input document. Its documentation does not commit to this + behavior, and an XPath 1.0 expression cannot control it. + + + + + + + + While XQuery/XPath provides all of the types defined in XML Schema + and many operators and functions over those types, XPath 1.0 has only + node-sets and the three atomic types boolean, + double, and string. + + + + + + XPath 1.0 has no conditional operator. An XQuery/XPath expression + such as if ( hat ) then hat/@size else "no hat" + has no XPath 1.0 equivalent. + + + + + + XPath 1.0 has no ordering comparison operator for strings. Both + "cat" < "dog" and + "cat" > "dog" are false, because each is a + numeric comparison of two NaNs. In contrast, + = and != do compare the strings + as strings. + + + + + + XPath 1.0 blurs the distinction between + value comparisons and + general comparisons as XQuery/XPath define + them. Both sale/@hatsize = 7 and + sale/@customer = "alice" are existentially + quantified comparisons, true if there is + any sale with the given value for the + attribute, but sale/@taxable = false() is a + value comparison to the + effective boolean value of a whole node-set. + It is true only if no sale has + a taxable attribute at all. + + + + + + In the XQuery/XPath data model, a document + node can have either document form (i.e., exactly one + top-level element, with only comments and processing instructions + outside of it) or content form (with those constraints + relaxed). Its equivalent in XPath 1.0, the + root node, can only be in document form. + This is part of the reason an xml value passed as the + context item to any PostgreSQL + XPath-based function must be in document form. + + + + + + + The differences highlighted here are not all of them. In XQuery and + the 2.0 and later versions of XPath, there is an XPath 1.0 compatibility + mode, and the W3C lists of + function library changes + and + language changes + applied in that mode offer a more complete (but still not exhaustive) + account of the differences. The compatibility mode cannot make the + later languages exactly equivalent to XPath 1.0. + + + + + Mappings between SQL and XML Data Types and Values + + + In SQL:2006 and later, both directions of conversion between standard SQL + data types and the XML Schema types are specified precisely. However, the + rules are expressed using the types and semantics of XQuery/XPath, and + have no direct application to the different data model of XPath 1.0. + + + + When PostgreSQL maps SQL data values to XML + (as in xmlelement), or XML to SQL (as in the output + columns of xmltable), except for a few cases + treated specially, PostgreSQL simply assumes + that the XML data type's XPath 1.0 string form will be valid as the + text-input form of the SQL datatype, and conversely. This rule has the + virtue of simplicity while producing, for many data types, results similar + to the mappings specified in the standard. + + + + Where interoperability with other systems is a concern, for some data + types, it may be necessary to use data type formatting functions (such + as those in ) explicitly to + produce the standard mappings. + + + + + + Incidental Limits of the Implementation + + + This section concerns limits that are not inherent in the + libxml2 library, but apply to the current + implementation in PostgreSQL. + + + + Only <literal>BY VALUE</literal> Passing Mechanism Is Supported + + + The SQL standard defines two passing mechanisms + that apply when passing an XML argument from SQL to an XML function or + receiving a result: BY REF, in which a particular XML + value retains its node identity, and BY VALUE, in which + the content of the XML is passed but node identity is not preserved. A + mechanism can be specified before a list of parameters, as the default + mechanism for all of them, or after any parameter, to override the + default. + + + + To illustrate the difference, if + x is an XML value, these two queries in + an SQL:2006 environment would produce true and false, respectively: + + +SELECT XMLQUERY('$a is $b' PASSING BY REF x AS a, x AS b NULL ON EMPTY); +SELECT XMLQUERY('$a is $b' PASSING BY VALUE x AS a, x AS b NULL ON EMPTY); + + + + + PostgreSQL will accept + BY VALUE or BY REF in an + XMLEXISTS or XMLTABLE + construct, but it ignores them. The xml data type holds + a character-string serialized representation, so there is no node + identity to preserve, and passing is always effectively BY + VALUE. + + + + + Cannot Pass Named Parameters to Queries + + + The XPath-based functions support passing one parameter to serve as the + XPath expression's context item, but do not support passing additional + values to be available to the expression as named parameters. + + + + + No <type>XML(SEQUENCE)</type> Type + + + The PostgreSQL xml data type + can only hold a value in DOCUMENT + or CONTENT form. An XQuery/XPath expression + context item must be a single XML node or atomic value, but XPath 1.0 + further restricts it to be only an XML node, and has no node type + allowing CONTENT. The upshot is that a + well-formed DOCUMENT is the only form of XML value + that PostgreSQL can supply as an XPath + context item. + + + + + + -- cgit v1.2.3