Re: Extended Statistics set/restore/clear functions.

On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 12:49:23AM -0500, Corey Huinker wrote:
> Negative numbers represent the Nth expression defined in the extended
> statistics object. So if you have extended statistics on a, b, length(a),
> length(b) then you can legally have -1 and -2 in the attributes, but
> nothing lower than that.
>
> See functions pg_ndistinct_validate_items() and
> pg_depdendencies_validate_deps() as these check the attributes in the value
> against the definition of the extended stats object.

Exactly. Extended stats on system columns don't work because they
don't really make sense as we want to track correlations between the
attributes defined, and these reflect internal states:
create table poo (a int, b int);
create statistics poos (ndistinct ) ON cmax, a from poo;
ERROR: 0A000: statistics creation on system columns is not supported

Note that the expressions are also stored in pg_stats_ext_exprs.

> I'm trying to implement those test cases, but I may have missed some.

I've found a lot of them with coverage-html during a previous lookup.
I'd like to think that we should aim for something close to 100%
coverage for the two input functions.

> Implemented many, but not all of these suggestions.

Thanks for the new versions, I'll also look at all these across the
next couple of days. Probably not at 0005~ for now.
--
Michael