Use standard casting mechanism to convert types in plpgsql, when possible.
plpgsql's historical method for converting datatypes during assignments was to apply the source type's output function and then the destination type's input function. Aside from being miserably inefficient in most cases, this method failed outright in many cases where a user might expect it to work; an example is that "declare x int; ... x := 3.9;" would fail, not round the value to 4. Instead, let's convert by applying the appropriate assignment cast whenever there is one. To avoid breaking compatibility unnecessarily, fall back to the I/O conversion method if there is no assignment cast. So far as I can tell, there is just one case where this method produces a different result than the old code in a case where the old code would not have thrown an error. That is assignment of a boolean value to a string variable (type text, varchar, or bpchar); the old way gave boolean's output representation, ie 't'/'f', while the new way follows the behavior of the bool-to-text cast and so gives 'true' or 'false'. This will need to be called out as an incompatibility in the 9.5 release notes. Aside from handling many conversion cases more sanely, this method is often significantly faster than the old way. In part that's because of more effective caching of the conversion info.
Showing
想要评论请 注册 或 登录