Re: SQL/JSON path: collation for comparisons, minor typos in docs

Markus Winand <markus.winand@winand.at>

From: Markus Winand <markus.winand@winand.at>
To: Alexander Korotkov <a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2019-08-08T08:53:20Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Hi!

The patch makes my tests pass.

I wonder about a few things:

- Isn’t there any code that could be re-used for that (the one triggered by ‘a’ < ‘A’ COLLATE ucs_basic)?

- For object key members, the standard also refers to unicode code point collation (SQL-2:2016 4.46.3, last paragraph).
- I guess it also applies to the “starts with” predicate, but I cannot find this explicitly stated in the standard.

My tests check whether those cases do case-sensitive comparisons. With my default collation "en_US.UTF-8” I cannot discover potential issues there. I haven’t played around with nondeterministic ICU collations yet :(

-markus
ps.: for me, testing the regular expression dialect of like_regex is out of scope


> On 8 Aug 2019, at 02:27, Alexander Korotkov <a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 3:05 AM Alexander Korotkov
> <a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru <mailto:a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru>> wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 12:55 AM Alexander Korotkov
>> <a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 4:11 PM Alexander Korotkov
>>> <a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 2:25 PM Markus Winand <markus.winand@winand.at> wrote:
>>>>> I was playing around with JSON path quite a bit and might have found one case where the current implementation doesn’t follow the standard.
>>>>> 
>>>>> The functionality in question are the comparison operators except ==. They use the database default collation rather then the standard-mandated "Unicode codepoint collation” (SQL-2:2016 9.39 General Rule 12 c iii 2 D, last sentence in first paragraph).
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you for pointing!  Nikita is about to write a patch fixing that.
>>> 
>>> Please, see the attached patch.
>>> 
>>> Our idea is to not sacrifice "==" operator performance for standard
>>> conformance.  So, "==" remains per-byte comparison.  For consistency
>>> in other operators we compare code points first, then do per-byte
>>> comparison.  In some edge cases, when same Unicode codepoints have
>>> different binary representations in database encoding, this behavior
>>> diverges standard.  In future we can implement strict standard
>>> conformance by normalization of input JSON strings.
>> 
>> Previous version of patch has buggy implementation of
>> compareStrings().  Revised version is attached.
> 
> Nikita pointed me that for UTF-8 strings per-byte comparison result
> matches codepoints comparison result.  That allows simplify patch a
> lot.
> 
> ------
> Alexander Korotkov
> Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com <http://www.postgrespro.com/>
> The Russian Postgres Company
> <0001-Use-Unicode-codepoint-collation-in-jsonpath-4.patch>

Commits

  1. Adjust string comparison in jsonpath

  2. Fix some typos in jsonpath documentation