Re: Bogus use of canonicalize_qual

On 10 March 2018 at 20:21, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I wrote:
>> Whilst fooling about with predtest.c, I noticed a rather embarrassing
>> error.  Consider the following, rather silly, CHECK constraint:
>> ...
>> So, what to do?  We have a few choices, none ideal:
>
> I'd been assuming that we need to back-patch a fix for this, but after
> further reflection, I'm not so sure.  The bug is only triggered by fairly
> silly CHECK constraints, and given that it's been there a long time (at
> least since 9.2 according to my tests) without any field reports, it seems
> likely that nobody is writing such silly CHECK constraints.
>
> If we suppose that we only need to fix it in HEAD, the most attractive
> answer is to add a parameter distinguishing WHERE and CHECK arguments
> to canonicalize_qual.  That allows symmetrical simplification of constant-
> NULL subexpressions in the two cases, and the fact that the caller now
> has to make an explicit choice of WHERE vs CHECK semantics might help
> discourage people from applying the function in cases where it's not
> clear which one applies.  PFA a patch that does it like that.
>

I agree that this looks like the best choice, but it feels a little
unsatisfactory to not back-patch a fix for such a glaring bug. You
could perhaps leave the signature of canonicalize_qual() the same, but
add a new canonicalize_check() function, and make both thin wrappers
on top of a local function accepting the is_check parameter.

Regards,
Dean