Re: Support for RANGE ... PRECEDING windows in OVER - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Ian Link
Subject Re: Support for RANGE ... PRECEDING windows in OVER
Date
Msg-id 51C3BAE4.6000909@ilink.io
Whole thread Raw
In response to Support for RANGE ... PRECEDING windows in OVER  (Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com>)
Responses Re: Support for RANGE ... PRECEDING windows in OVER
List pgsql-hackers
I am currently looking into this feature. However, as I am quite new to Postgres, I think it might take me a while to get up to speed. Anyways, I would also appreciate another round of discussion on the future of the windowing functions.

Ian Link

Thursday, June 20, 2013 7:24 PM
Hi all

Since 8.4, PostgreSQL has had extremely useful window function support -
but support for "RANGE PRECEDING / FOLLOWING" windows was dropped late
in 8.4's development in order to get the rest of the feature in, per
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-02/msg00540.php.

It looks like there was discussion of requiring a new opclass to be
declared for types or otherwise extending opclasses to provide the
information required for RANGE ... PRECEDING / FOLLOWING (
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20100211201444.GA28270@svana.org )
. I can't find any sign that it went anywhere beyond some broad
discussion:
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/13993.1265920013@sss.pgh.pa.us at
the time.

I've missed this feature more than once, and am curious about whether
any more recent changes may have made it cleaner to tackle this, or
whether consensus can be formed on adding the new entries to btree's
opclass to avoid the undesirable explicit lookups of the '+' and '-'
oprators.

Some question seems to remain open about how ranges over
timestamps/intervals should work, but this wasn't elaborated on.

There's been interest in this, eg:

http://pgsql.hackers.free-usenet.eu/[HACKERS]-range-intervals-in-window-function-frames_T66085695_S1

http://grokbase.com/t/postgresql/pgsql-general/105a89gm2n/postgresql-9-0-support-for-range-value-preceding-window-functions



Attachment

pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: Craig Ringer
Date:
Subject: Support for RANGE ... PRECEDING windows in OVER
Next
From: Alvaro Herrera
Date:
Subject: Re: backend hangs at immediate shutdown (Re: Back-branch update releases coming in a couple weeks)