postgresql/doc
Peter Eisentraut fc0438b4e8 Add temporal PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints
Add WITHOUT OVERLAPS clause to PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints.
These are backed by GiST indexes instead of B-tree indexes, since they
are essentially exclusion constraints with = for the scalar parts of
the key and && for the temporal part.

(previously committed as 46a0cd4cef, reverted by 46a0cd4cefb; the new
part is this:)

Because 'empty' && 'empty' is false, the temporal PK/UQ constraint
allowed duplicates, which is confusing to users and breaks internal
expectations.  For instance, when GROUP BY checks functional
dependencies on the PK, it allows selecting other columns from the
table, but in the presence of duplicate keys you could get the value
from any of their rows.  So we need to forbid empties.

This all means that at the moment we can only support ranges and
multiranges for temporal PK/UQs, unlike the original patch (above).
Documentation and tests for this are added.  But this could
conceivably be extended by introducing some more general support for
the notion of "empty" for other types.

Author: Paul A. Jungwirth <pj@illuminatedcomputing.com>
Reviewed-by: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
Reviewed-by: jian he <jian.universality@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CA+renyUApHgSZF9-nd-a0+OPGharLQLO=mDHcY4_qQ0+noCUVg@mail.gmail.com
2024-09-17 11:29:30 +02:00
..
src Add temporal PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints 2024-09-17 11:29:30 +02:00
KNOWN_BUGS
Makefile
MISSING_FEATURES
TODO