Re: pg_upgrade failure due to dependencies

On Tue, 2025-07-01 at 11:23 +0530, Nikhil Shetty wrote:
> I was trying an upgrade from PostgreSQL 13 and PostGIS 3.1.2 TO PostgreSQL 15 and PostGIS 3.4.2 and got below error
>
> pg_restore: creating TABLE "table1"
> pg_restore: while PROCESSING TOC:
> pg_restore: from TOC entry 551; 1259 39789310 TABLE table1 db1
> pg_restore: error: could not execute query: ERROR: relation "public.spatial_ref_sys" does not exist
> LINE 1: ...LECT proj4text, auth_name, auth_srid, srtext FROM public.spa...
>                                                              ^
> QUERY: SELECT proj4text, auth_name, auth_srid, srtext FROM public.spatial_ref_sys WHERE srid = 3857 LIMIT 1
> Command was:
>
>
> Table Structure
>
> CREATE TABLE table1 (
>     "id1" numeric NOT NULL,
>     "geom" "public"."geometry"(Geometry,4326),
>     "geom_3857" "public"."geometry"(Geometry,3857) GENERATED ALWAYS AS ("public"."st_transform"("public"."st_intersection"("geom", "public"."st_transform"("public"."st_tileenvelope"(0, 0, 0), 4326)), 3857)) STORED
> );
>
> The st_transform function used in above table definition uses public.spatial_ref_sys to check the SRID
> but since public.spatial_ref_sys is not restored yet, the table creation for table1 fails
>
> I checked with the PostGIS community and they suggested this needs to be fixed in pg_upgrade because
> it is not checking the dependencies in this particular case. Even if it restores public.spatial_ref_sys
> first, another problem here is that it is checking for a record in the 'public.spatial_ref_sys' table
> which does not exist and would be populated during the upgrade link.
>
> I am adding this in the community to check if there is a way to fix this kind of problem during upgrade?

The PostGIS people must be misinformed.
The fault is clearly theirs for marking the function st_transform(geometry, text, integer) as IMMUTABLE:

\sf st_transform(geometry, text, integer)

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.st_transform(geom geometry, from_proj text, to_srid integer)
RETURNS geometry
LANGUAGE sql
IMMUTABLE PARALLEL SAFE STRICT COST 5000
AS $function$SELECT public.postgis_transform_geometry($1, $2, proj4text, $3)
FROM public.spatial_ref_sys WHERE srid=$3;$function$

Anything that selects from a table may not be marked IMMUTABLE, since the contents of the table
can change. In your case, the table did not even exist.
Moreover, PostgreSQL cannot check dependencies, since the function was defined using the "old"
style for SQL functions, where the function body is just a string. If they had used the standard
conforming new style, PostgreSQL would try to trach dependencies. Not sure if that would have been
enough to avoid the problem, but clearly better.

Did you open a bug report on https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis ?

Yours,
Laurenz Albe