Re: Something's busted in plpgsql composite-variable handling

I wrote:
> [ dropping and recreating a composite type confuses plpgsql ]
> That's not very nice. What's worse is that it works cleanly in v10,
> making this a regression, no doubt caused by the hacking I did on
> plpgsql's handling of composite variables.

After further poking, I've concluded that it's largely chance that
I tried an example that works in v10, because a lot of related
cases don't. This particular test case only accesses the record's
fields by name, and in the PLPGSQL_DTYPE_ROW code paths those are
compiled into separate scalar variables that are still valid even
though an access to the whole record would fail. I'm dubious that
it's a common use-case to create a composite variable that is only
used as if it were a set of independent variables.

Also, you can get similar failures by dropping and recreating
other sorts of user-defined types, not just composites, and those
errors go way back.

So, if we were to do something about this, I think it ought to involve
recompiling the function if it contains any reference to a user-defined
type that got dropped since last time; that's not specific to composite
variables. Maybe that's something we'll get motivated to do someday ...
but I'm not sure how to do it without taking a performance hit for
checking for the situation, and in any case it seems like new development
not something to tackle in late beta.

So I'm now inclined to withdraw this as an open item. On the other
hand, it is a bit worrisome that I happened to hit on a case that
worked better before. Maybe I'm wrong to judge this unlikely to
happen in the field.

Thoughts?

regards, tom lane