Allow empty target list in SELECT.
This fixes a problem noted as a followup to bug #8648: if a query has a
semantically-empty target list, e.g. SELECT * FROM zero_column_table,
ruleutils.c will dump it as a syntactically-empty target list, which was
not allowed. There doesn't seem to be any reliable way to fix this by
hacking ruleutils (note in particular that the originally zero-column table
might since have had columns added to it); and even if we had such a fix,
it would do nothing for existing dump files that might contain bad syntax.
The best bet seems to be to relax the syntactic restriction.
Also, add parse-analysis errors for SELECT DISTINCT with no columns (after
*-expansion) and RETURNING with no columns. These cases previously
produced unexpected behavior because the parsed Query looked like it had
no DISTINCT or RETURNING clause, respectively. If anyone ever offers
a plausible use-case for this, we could work a bit harder on making the
situation distinguishable.
Arguably this is a bug fix that should be back-patched, but I'm worried
that there may be client apps or PLs that expect "SELECT ;" to throw a
syntax error. The issue doesn't seem important enough to risk changing
behavior in minor releases.
Branch
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master
Details
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http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/1b4f7f93b4693858cb983af3cd557f6097dab67b
Modified Files
--------------
doc/src/sgml/ref/select.sgml | 28 +++++++++++++++++++++-------
src/backend/parser/analyze.c | 13 +++++++++++++
src/backend/parser/gram.y | 8 ++++++--
src/backend/parser/parse_clause.c | 19 +++++++++++++++++++
src/test/regress/expected/errors.out | 23 ++++++++---------------
src/test/regress/sql/errors.sql | 15 ++++++---------
6 files changed, 73 insertions(+), 33 deletions(-)
