Thread: BUG #15676: FOR UPDATE is not allowed with UNION ALL (and of course with UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT, DISTINCT?)

The following bug has been logged on the website:

Bug reference:      15676
Logged by:          Gunther Schadow
Email address:      gunther.schadow@gmail.com
PostgreSQL version: 11.2
Operating system:   all
Description:

SELECT ... FOR UPDATE locks the roiw(s) being retrieved.

UNION ALL is a nice way to retrieving rows from two tables, and
implementation of UNION ALL is just a concatenation, each row returned comes
from either one of the base table, and thus could be locked.

Obviously the hard set semantics relational operators UNION (without ALL),
INTERSECT, EXCEPT, and really also DISTINCT, should justifiable have limits
in how you might to row locking. So it is justified not to support FOR
UPDATE on those concepts. But on a UNION ALL it is not justified, only that
it has not been done, and the error suggests that the UNION ALL case has not
bee considered as fundamentally different from the other set operators.

PG Bug reporting form <noreply@postgresql.org> writes:
> SELECT ... FOR UPDATE locks the roiw(s) being retrieved.
> UNION ALL is a nice way to retrieving rows from two tables, and
> implementation of UNION ALL is just a concatenation, each row returned comes
> from either one of the base table, and thus could be locked.

You can get the result you want like this:

    (SELECT ... FROM ... FOR UPDATE)
    UNION ALL
    (SELECT ... FROM ... FOR UPDATE)
    UNION ALL
    (SELECT ... FROM ... FOR UPDATE)
    ...

The parens are necessary for syntactic reasons (FOR UPDATE has the
wrong precedence otherwise).

> Obviously the hard set semantics relational operators UNION (without ALL),
> INTERSECT, EXCEPT, and really also DISTINCT, should justifiable have limits
> in how you might to row locking. So it is justified not to support FOR
> UPDATE on those concepts. But on a UNION ALL it is not justified, only that
> it has not been done, and the error suggests that the UNION ALL case has not
> bee considered as fundamentally different from the other set operators.

Even if it were a good idea to treat UNION ALL as significantly different
from the other set operators, which I dispute, it'd still be fairly weird
to allow something like FOR UPDATE to propagate down into the individual
UNION arms from outside.  For one thing, SQL generally avoids letting
context affect the semantics of a sub-construct.  For another, an outer
FOR UPDATE might be meaningless in some UNION arms or have significantly
different meanings in some arms than others.  The only constraint UNION
puts on the sub-queries is that they yield compatible result columns, not
that they are all similar SELECTs.

            regards, tom lane