• Tom Lane's avatar
    Build in some knowledge about foreign-key relationships in the catalogs. · 62f34097
    Tom Lane authored
    This follows in the spirit of commit dfb75e47, which created primary
    key and uniqueness constraints to improve the visibility of constraints
    imposed on the system catalogs.  While our catalogs contain many
    foreign-key-like relationships, they don't quite follow SQL semantics,
    in that the convention for an omitted reference is to write zero not
    NULL.  Plus, we have some cases in which there are arrays each of whose
    elements is supposed to be an FK reference; SQL has no way to model that.
    So we can't create actual foreign key constraints to describe the
    situation.  Nonetheless, we can collect and use knowledge about these
    relationships.
    
    This patch therefore adds annotations to the catalog header files to
    declare foreign-key relationships.  (The BKI_LOOKUP annotations cover
    simple cases, but we weren't previously distinguishing which such
    columns are allowed to contain zeroes; we also need new markings for
    multi-column FK references.)  Then, Catalog.pm and genbki.pl are
    taught to collect this information into a table in a new generated
    header "system_fk_info.h".  The only user of that at the moment is
    a new SQL function pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys(), which exposes the
    table to SQL.  The oidjoins regression test is rewritten to use
    pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys() to find out which columns to check.
    Aside from removing the need for manual maintenance of that test
    script, this allows it to cover numerous relationships that were not
    checked by the old implementation based on findoidjoins.  (As of this
    commit, 217 relationships are checked by the test, versus 181 before.)
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3240355.1612129197@sss.pgh.pa.us
    62f34097
pg_foreign_table.h 1.57 KB