Re: Recording foreign key relationships for the system catalogs - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Joel Jacobson
Subject Re: Recording foreign key relationships for the system catalogs
Date
Msg-id 9542ec0d-2ade-444d-95e4-92b335ae32f2@www.fastmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Recording foreign key relationships for the system catalogs  ("Joel Jacobson" <joel@compiler.org>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Feb 3, 2021, at 21:41, Joel Jacobson wrote:
>Otherwise I think it would be more natural to change both is_array and is_opt
>to boolean[] with the same cardinality as fkcols and pkcols,
>to allow unnest()ing of them as well.

Another option would perhaps be to add a new
system view in src/backend/catalog/system_views.sql

I see there are other cases with a slightly more complex view
using a function with a similar name, such as
the pg_stat_activity using pg_stat_get_activity().

Similar to this, maybe we could add a pg_catalog_foreign_keys view
using the output from pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys():

Example usage:

SELECT * FROM pg_catalog_foreign_keys
WHERE fktable = 'pg_constraint'::regclass
AND pktable = 'pg_attribute'::regclass;

fkid |    fktable    |   fkcol   |   pktable    |  pkcol   | is_array | is_opt | ordinal_position
------+---------------+-----------+--------------+----------+----------+--------+------------------
   48 | pg_constraint | conkey    | pg_attribute | attnum   | t        | t      |                1
   48 | pg_constraint | conrelid  | pg_attribute | attrelid | f        | f      |                2
   49 | pg_constraint | confkey   | pg_attribute | attnum   | t        | f      |                1
   49 | pg_constraint | confrelid | pg_attribute | attrelid | f        | f      |                2
(4 rows)

The point of this would be to avoid unnecessary increase of data model complexity,
which I agree is not needed, since we only need single booleans as of today,
but to provide a more information_schema-like system view,
i.e. with columns on separate rows, with ordinal_position.

Since we don't have any "constraint_name" for these,
we need to enumerate the fks first, to let ordinal_position
be the position within each such fkid.

Here is my proposal on how to implement:

CREATE VIEW pg_catalog_foreign_keys AS
    WITH
    enumerate_fks AS (
        SELECT
            *,
            ROW_NUMBER() OVER () AS fkid
        FROM pg_catalog.pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys()
    ),
    unnest_cols AS (
        SELECT
            C.fkid,
            C.fktable,
            unnest(C.fkcols) AS fkcol,
            C.pktable,
            unnest(C.pkcols) AS pkcol,
            unnest(
                CASE cardinality(fkcols)
                    WHEN 1 THEN ARRAY[C.is_array]
                    WHEN 2 THEN ARRAY[FALSE,C.is_array]
                END
            ) AS is_array,
            unnest(
                CASE cardinality(fkcols)
                    WHEN 1 THEN ARRAY[C.is_opt]
                    WHEN 2 THEN ARRAY[FALSE,C.is_opt]
                END
            ) AS is_opt
        FROM enumerate_fks AS C
    )
    SELECT
        *,
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (
            PARTITION BY U.fkid
            ORDER BY U.fkcol, U.pkcol
        ) AS ordinal_position
    FROM unnest_cols AS U;

I think both the pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys() function
and this view are useful in different ways,
so it's good to provide both.

Only providing pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys() will
arguably mean some users of the function will need to implement
something like the same as above on their own, if they need the is_array and is_opt
value for a specific fkcol.

/Joel

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