Re: Fix bug with indexes on whole-row expressions

On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 7:01 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> ywgrit <yw987194828(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > I forbid to create indexes on whole-row expression in the following
> patch.
> > I'd like to hear your opinions.
>
> As I said in the previous thread, I don't think this can possibly
> be acceptable. Surely there are people depending on the capability.
> I'm not worried so much about the exact case of an index column
> being a whole-row Var --- I agree that that's pretty useless ---
> but an index column that is a function on a whole-row Var seems
> quite useful. (Your patch fails to detect that, BTW, which means
> it does not block the case presented in bug #18244.)
>
> I thought about extending the ALTER TABLE logic to disallow changes
> in composite types that appear in index expressions. We already have
> find_composite_type_dependencies(), and it turns out that this already
> blocks ALTER for the case you want to forbid, but we concluded that we
> didn't need to prevent it for the bug #18244 case:
>
> * If objsubid identifies a specific column, refer to that in error
> * messages. Otherwise, search to see if there's a user column of
> the
> * type. (We assume system columns are never of interesting
> types.)
> * The search is needed because an index containing an expression
> * column of the target type will just be recorded as a
> whole-relation
> * dependency. If we do not find a column of the type, the
> dependency
> * must indicate that the type is transiently referenced in an
> index
> * expression but not stored on disk, which we assume is OK, just
> as
> * we do for references in views. (It could also be that the
> target
> * type is embedded in some container type that is stored in an
> index
> * column, but the previous recursion should catch such cases.)
>
> Perhaps a reasonable answer would be to issue a WARNING (not error)
> in the case where an index has this kind of dependency. The index
> might need to be reindexed --- but it might not, too, and in any case
> I doubt that flat-out forbidding the ALTER is a helpful idea.
>
> regards, tom lane
>

WARNING can be easily overlooked. Users of mobile/web apps don't see
Postgres WARNINGs.

Forbidding ALTER sounds more reasonable.

Do you see any good use cases for whole-row indexes?

And for such cases, wouldn't it be reasonable for users to specify all
columns explicitly? E.g.:

create index on t using btree(row(c1, c2, c3));