Note: currently, only btree access method supports  multi-
       attribute indices.  Up to 7 keys may be specified.

Add a little info on count().

Subject: Re: [PATCHES] SET DateStyle patches

On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

> Some more patches! These (try to) finish implementing SET variable TO value
> for "DateStyle" (changed the name from simply "date" to be more descriptive).
> This is based on code from Martin and Bruce (?), which was easy to modify.
> The syntax is
>
> SET DateStyle TO 'iso'
> SET DateStyle TO 'postgres'
> SET DateStyle TO 'sql'
> SET DateStyle TO 'european'
> SET DateStyle TO 'noneuropean'
> SET DateStyle TO 'us'         (same as "noneuropean")
> SET DateStyle TO 'default'    (current same as "postgres,us")
>
> ("european" is just compared for the first 4 characters, and "noneuropean"
> is compared for the first 7 to allow less typing).
>
> Multiple arguments are allowed, so SET datestyle TO 'sql,euro' is valid.
>
> My mods also try to implement "SHOW variable" and "RESET variable", but
> that part just core dumps at the moment. I would guess that my errors
> are obvious to someone who knows what they are doing with the parser stuff,
> so if someone (Bruce and/or Martin??) could have it do the right thing
> we will have a more complete set of what we need.
>
> Also, I would like to have a floating point precision global variable to
> implement "SET precision TO 10" and perhaps "SET precision TO 10,2" for
> float8 and float4, but I don't know how to do that for integer types rather
> than strings. If someone is fixing the SHOW and RESET code, perhaps they can
> add some hooks for me to do the floats while they are at it.
>
> I've left some remnants of variable structures in the source code which
> I did not use in the interests of getting something working for v6.1.
> We'll have time to clean things up for the next release...

Subject: [HACKERS] More date time functions

Here are some additional patches mostly related to the date and time
data types. It includes some type conversion routines to move between
the different date types and some other date manipulation routines such
as date_part(units,datetime).

I noticed Edmund Mergl et al's neat trick for getting function overloading
for builtin functions, so started to use that for the date and time stuff.
Later, if someone figures out how to get function overloading directly
for internal C code, then we can move to that technique.

These patches include documentation updates (don't faint!) for the built-in
man page. Doesn't yet include mention of timestamp, since I don't know
much about it and since it may change a bit to become a _real_ ANSI timestamp
which would include parser support for the declaration syntax (what do you
think, Dan?).

The patches were developed on the 970330 release, but have been rebuilt
off of the 970402 release. The first patch below is to get libpq to compile,
on my Linux box, but is not related to the rest of the patches and you can
choose not to apply that one at this time. Thanks in advance, scrappy!

Just noticed that the psql man page is missing the -T option for specifying
HTML table options.

By Edmund

from a #define to a run-time option '-e'

Man page was updated to reflect new option

D'Arcy J.M. Cain                           |  Democracy is three wolves