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Tom Lane authored
Previously, we left such literals alone if the query or subquery had no properties forcing a type decision to be made (such as an ORDER BY or DISTINCT clause using that output column). This meant that "unknown" could be an exposed output column type, which has never been a great idea because it could result in strange failures later on. For example, an outer query that tried to do any operations on an unknown-type subquery output would generally fail with some weird error like "failed to find conversion function from unknown to text" or "could not determine which collation to use for string comparison". Also, if the case occurred in a CREATE VIEW's query then the view would have an unknown-type column, causing similar failures in queries trying to use the view. To fix, at the tail end of parse analysis of a query, forcibly convert any remaining "unknown" literals in its SELECT or RETURNING list to type text. However, provide a switch to suppress that, and use it in the cases of SELECT inside a set operation or INSERT command. In those cases we already had type resolution rules that make use of context information from outside the subquery proper, and we don't want to change that behavior. Also, change creation of an unknown-type column in a relation from a warning to a hard error. The error should be unreachable now in CREATE VIEW or CREATE MATVIEW, but it's still possible to explicitly say "unknown" in CREATE TABLE or CREATE (composite) TYPE. We want to forbid that because it's nothing but a foot-gun. This change creates a pg_upgrade failure case: a matview that contains an unknown-type column can't be pg_upgraded, because reparsing the matview's defining query will now decide that the column is of type text, which doesn't match the cstring-like storage that the old materialized column would actually have. Add a checking pass to detect that. While at it, we can detect tables or composite types that would fail, essentially for free. Those would fail safely anyway later on, but we might as well fail earlier. This patch is by me, but it owes something to previous investigations by Rahila Syed. Also thanks to Ashutosh Bapat and Michael Paquier for review. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2L28uwwbL9HUM-WR=hromW1Cvamkn7O-g8fPY2m=_7muJ0oA@mail.gmail.com
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