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Tom Lane authored
pg_dump's traditional solution for breaking a circular dependency involving a view was to create the view with CREATE TABLE and then later issue CREATE RULE "_RETURN" ... to convert the table to a view, relying on the backend's very very ancient code that supports making views that way. We've wanted to get rid of that kluge for a long time, but the thing that finally motivates doing something about it is the recognition that this method fails with the --clean option, because it leads to issuing DROP RULE "_RETURN" followed by DROP TABLE --- and the backend won't let you drop a view's _RETURN rule. Instead, let's break circular dependencies by initially creating the view using CREATE VIEW AS SELECT NULL::columntype AS columnname, ... (so that it has the right column names and types to support external references, but no dependencies beyond the column data types), and then later dumping the ON SELECT rule using the spelling CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW. This method wasn't available when this code was originally written, but it's been possible since PG 7.3, so it seems fine to start relying on it now. To solve the --clean problem, make the dropStmt for an ON SELECT rule be CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW with the same dummy target list as above. In this way, during the DROP phase, we first reduce the view to have no extra dependencies, and then we can drop it entirely when we've gotten rid of whatever had a circular dependency on it. (Note: this should work adequately well with the --if-exists option, since the CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW will go through whether the view exists or not. It could fail if the view exists with a conflicting column set, but we don't really support --clean against a non-matching database anyway.) This allows cleaning up some other kluges inside pg_dump, notably that we don't need a notion of reloptions attached to a rule anymore. Although this is a bug fix, commit to HEAD only for now. The problem's existed for a long time and we've had relatively few complaints, so it doesn't really seem worth taking risks to fix it in the back branches. We might revisit that choice if no problems emerge. Discussion: <19092.1479325184@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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