Whenever people look for help with queries, one of the first things that I ask is: what is \d of the table.
Which works great, with the caveat, that the person on the other end must be somewhat familiar with psql. And quite often it's not the case.
So I figured, I can try to fix it.
Well, the short answer is: NEVER. But given how often I see people ask about it, I'll try to expand my answer a bit…
On 4th of February 2023, Dean Rasheed committed patch:
Allow underscores in integer and numeric constants.
This allows underscores to be used in integer and numeric literals,
and their corresponding type input functions, for visual grouping.
For example:
1_500_000_000
3.14159_26535_89793
0xffff_ffff
0b_1001_0001
A single underscore is allowed between any 2 digits, or immediately
after the base prefix indicator of non-decimal integers, per SQL:202x
draft.
Peter Eisentraut and Dean Rasheed
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/84aae844-dc55-a4be-86d9-4f0fa405cc97%40enterprisedb.comContinue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 16 – Allow underscores in integer and numeric constants.
FZF is quite popular tool for fuzzy string finder. Very helpful for checking history of commands.
But, can I use it in psql?
On 9th of January 2023, Tom Lane committed patch:
Invent random_normal() to provide normally-distributed random numbers. There is already a version of this in contrib/tablefunc, but it seems sufficiently widely useful to justify having it in core. Paul Ramsey Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CACowWR0DqHAvOKUCNxTrASFkWsDLqKMd6WiXvVvaWg4pV1BMnQ@mail.gmail.com
On 14th of December 2022, Peter Eisentraut committed patch:
Non-decimal integer literals
Add support for hexadecimal, octal, and binary integer literals:
0x42F
0o273
0b100101
per SQL:202x draft.
This adds support in the lexer as well as in the integer type input
functions.
Reviewed-by: John Naylor <john.naylor@enterprisedb.com>
Reviewed-by: Zhihong Yu <zyu@yugabyte.com>
Reviewed-by: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/b239564c-cad0-b23e-c57e-166d883cb97d@enterprisedb.comContinue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 16 – Non-decimal integer literals
On 14th of December 2022, Jeff Davis committed patch:
Add grantable MAINTAIN privilege and pg_maintain role. Allows VACUUM, ANALYZE, REINDEX, REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW, CLUSTER, and LOCK TABLE. Effectively reverts 4441fc704d. Instead of creating separate privileges for VACUUM, ANALYZE, and other maintenance commands, group them together under a single MAINTAIN privilege. Author: Nathan Bossart Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20221212210136.GA449764@nathanxps13 Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/45224.1670476523@sss.pgh.pa.us
Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 16 – Add grantable MAINTAIN privilege and pg_maintain role.
Title: On 9th of December 2022, Tom Lane committed patch:
Add test scaffolding for soft error reporting from input functions. pg_input_is_valid() returns boolean, while pg_input_error_message() returns the primary error message if the input is bad, or NULL if the input is OK. The main reason for having two functions is so that we can test both the details-wanted and the no-details-wanted code paths. Although these are primarily designed with testing in mind, it could well be that they'll be useful to end users as well. This patch is mostly by me, but it owes very substantial debt to earlier work by Nikita Glukhov, Andrew Dunstan, and Amul Sul. Thanks to Andres Freund for review. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3bbbb0df-7382-bf87-9737-340ba096e034@postgrespro.ru
Whenever I'm doing some testing I need sample data. Easiest way to do it is to generate data using some random/generate_series queries.
But what if I need specific frequencies?
For example, I need to generate 10,000,000 rows, where there will be 10% of ‘a', 20% of ‘b', and the rest will be split equally between ‘c' and ‘d'?