Re: [HACKERS] Some progress on INSERT/SELECT/GROUP BY bugs

Tom, is this fixed?

> I believe I've identified the main cause of the peculiar behavior we
> are seeing with INSERT ... SELECT ... GROUP/ORDER BY: it's a subtle
> parser bug.
>
> Here is the test case I'm looking at:
>
> CREATE TABLE si_tmpverifyaccountbalances (
> type int4 NOT NULL,
> memberid int4 NOT NULL,
> categoriesid int4 NOT NULL,
> amount numeric);
>
> CREATE TABLE invoicelinedetails (
> invoiceid int4,
> memberid int4,
> totshippinghandling numeric,
> invoicelinesid int4);
>
> INSERT INTO si_tmpverifyaccountbalances SELECT invoiceid+3,
> memberid, 1, totshippinghandling FROM invoicelinedetails
> GROUP BY invoiceid+3, memberid, totshippinghandling;
>
> ERROR: INSERT has more expressions than target columns
>
> The reason this is coming out is that the matching of GROUP BY (also
> ORDER BY) items to targetlist entries is fundamentally broken in this
> context. The GROUP BY items "memberid" and "totshippinghandling" are
> simply unvarnished Ident nodes when they arrive at findTargetlistEntry()
> in parse_clause.c; what findTargetlistEntry() does with them is to try
> to match them against the resdom names of the existing targetlist items.
> I think that's correct behavior in the plain SELECT case (but note it
> means "SELECT a AS b, b AS c GROUP BY b" will really group by a not b
> --- is that per spec??). But it fails miserably in the INSERT/SELECT
> case, because by the time control gets here, the targetlist items have
> been given resdom names *corresponding to the column names of the target
> table*.
>
> So, in the example at hand, "memberid" is matched to the correct column
> by pure luck (because it has the same name in the destination table),
> and then "totshippinghandling" is not recognized as one of the existing
> TLEs because it does not match any destination column name.
>
> Now, call me silly, but it seems to me that SELECT ... GROUP BY ought
> to mean the same thing no matter whether there is an INSERT in front of
> it or not, and thus that letting target column names affect the meaning
> of GROUP BY items is dead wrong. (Don't have a spec to check this with,
> however.)
>
> I believe the most reasonable fix for this is to postpone relabeling
> of the targetlist entries with destination column names until after
> analysis of the SELECT's subsidiary clauses is complete. In particular,
> it should *not* be done instantly when each TLE is made, which is what
> MakeTargetEntryIdent currently does. The TLEs should have the same
> resnames as in the SELECT case until after subsidiary clause processing
> is done.
>
> (MakeTargetEntryIdent is broken anyway because it tries to associate
> a destination column with every TLE, even the resjunk ones. The reason
> we see the quoted error message in this situation is that after
> findTargetlistEntry fails to detect that totshippinghandling is already
> a TLE, it calls MakeTargetEntryIdent to make a junk TLE for
> totshippinghandling, and then MakeTargetEntryIdent tries to find a
> target column to go with the junk TLE. So the revised code should only
> assign dest column names to non-junk TLEs.)
>
> I'm not really familiar enough with the parser to want to tackle this
> size of change by myself --- Thomas, do you want to do it? I think it's
> largely a matter of moving code around, but I'm not sure where is the
> right place for it...
>
> regards, tom lane
>
>

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