ALTER DOMAIN / DROP CONSTRAINT on a nonexistent constraint name did
not report any error.  Now it reports an error.  The IF EXISTS option
was added to get the usual behavior of ignoring nonexistent objects to
drop.

You could already rename domains using ALTER TYPE, but with this new
command it is more consistent with how other commands treat domains as
a subcategory of types.

There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup.  The problem is
in a situation like

<para>
 <command>FOO</command> is ...

there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO".  In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.

So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like

<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>

So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace.  I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.

This means that they can initially be added to a large existing table
without checking its initial contents, but new tuples must comply to
them; a separate pass invoked by ALTER TABLE / VALIDATE can verify
existing data and ensure it complies with the constraint, at which point
it is marked validated and becomes a normal part of the table ecosystem.

An non-validated CHECK constraint is ignored in the planner for
constraint_exclusion purposes; when validated, cached plans are
recomputed so that partitioning starts working right away.

This patch also enables domains to have unvalidated CHECK constraints
attached to them as well by way of ALTER DOMAIN / ADD CONSTRAINT / NOT
VALID, which can later be validated with ALTER DOMAIN / VALIDATE
CONSTRAINT.

Thanks to Thom Brown, Dean Rasheed and Jaime Casanova for the various
reviews, and Robert Hass for documentation wording improvement
suggestions.

This patch was sponsored by Enova Financial.

Block elements with verbatim formatting (literallayout, programlisting,
screen, synopsis) should be aligned at column 0 independent of the surrounding
SGML, because whitespace is significant, and indenting them creates erratic
whitespace in the output.  The CSS stylesheets already take care of indenting
the output.

Assorted markup improvements to go along with it.

The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation.  In  the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation.  The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.

another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).

This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.

man page tools.

needs to check the new constraint against columns of derived domains too.

Also, make it error out if the domain to be modified is used within any
composite-type columns.  Eventually we should support that case, but it seems
a bit painful, and not suitable for a back-patch.  For the moment just let the
user know we can't do it.

Backpatch to 8.2, which is the only released version that allows nested
domains.  Possibly the other part should be back-patched further.

Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:

        may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."

        can - ability, "I can lift that log."

        might - possibility, "It might rain today."

Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice.  Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".

affected types of objects.

editorialization.

is used as if it were the latest (and/or still valid) SQL standard.
SQL:2003 is used in its place. Patch from Simon Riggs.

Robert Treat

pages. From Robert Treat.

by Troels Arvin, Simon Riggs, Elein Mustain

Make spelling of SQL standard names uniform.

$Header: -> $PostgreSQL Changes ...

discussion.  (Still have some work to do editing the remainder.)

to domain when copying alter table docs.
--
Rod Taylor <rbt@rbt.ca>

of configure