• Tom Lane's avatar
    Reconsider the handling of procedure OUT parameters. · e56bce5d
    Tom Lane authored
    Commit 2453ea14 redefined pg_proc.proargtypes to include the types of
    OUT parameters, for procedures only.  While that had some advantages
    for implementing the SQL-spec behavior of DROP PROCEDURE, it was pretty
    disastrous from a number of other perspectives.  Notably, since the
    primary key of pg_proc is name + proargtypes, this made it possible to
    have multiple procedures with identical names + input arguments and
    differing output argument types.  That would make it impossible to call
    any one of the procedures by writing just NULL (or "?", or any other
    data-type-free notation) for the output argument(s).  The change also
    seems likely to cause grave confusion for client applications that
    examine pg_proc and expect the traditional definition of proargtypes.
    
    Hence, revert the definition of proargtypes to what it was, and
    undo a number of complications that had been added to support that.
    
    To support the SQL-spec behavior of DROP PROCEDURE, when there are
    no argmode markers in the command's parameter list, we perform the
    lookup both ways (that is, matching against both proargtypes and
    proallargtypes), succeeding if we get just one unique match.
    In principle this could result in ambiguous-function failures
    that would not happen when using only one of the two rules.
    However, overloading of procedure names is thought to be a pretty
    rare usage, so this shouldn't cause many problems in practice.
    Postgres-specific code such as pg_dump can defend against any
    possibility of such failures by being careful to specify argmodes
    for all procedure arguments.
    
    This also fixes a few other bugs in the area of CALL statements
    with named parameters, and improves the documentation a little.
    
    catversion bump forced because the representation of procedures
    with OUT arguments changes.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3742981.1621533210@sss.pgh.pa.us
    e56bce5d
catalogs.sgml 461 KB